A few years ago I played a game of monopoly with my sister and her family. It was as intense as some monopoly games can be. The whole game became about keeping Mayfair and Parklane separate so my nephew couldn’t begin building on them ... and the strategies went to and fro as properties changed hands and players went tearfully, resentfully bankrupt. Very stressful, with all the arguments and tears. As I said, it was intense.
Halfway through the game we took a break.
I walked out to the garden with a glass of wine to stand beside the pond they have out there and look up at ghostly clouds skidding overhead in the night sky, and inside the house I could hear a bitter argument over the loss of something ... and some kid’s victorious cackle of laughter at the gain of something else, together with my sister raising her voice trying to placate the emotional residue from the game.
The cloud I was watching became two clouds ... then reformed to become one again ... and the trees all whispered around me, their leaves swaying and rustling in the breeze .... and the dog that was asleep on the sun-lounge lifted its head as another dog barked far away ... and I realized that the world is so big, and unconcerned with things so small as the loss of Park Lane, or Mayfair ... right then in Somalia child soldiers were smoking dope and cleaning their guns ... in London smart young things were doing coke off the lids of toilets .... lovers were strolling hand in hand along the banks of the river Seine ... people everywhere on the planet were living, dying, working, sleeping, laughing, making love ... plotting scheming ... and all the while the clouds kept dividing and reforming, disappearing and appearing while the world spins silently through space ...
Standing there watching the clouds, the bizarreness of I'd been doing came over me ... that when I was playing this game of monopoly, nothing else had existed but that tiny little game. The game had formed its own tight horizon around me, encapsulating my life - and in that tiny little flurry of activity, for all of us grouped around the board, time sped up and blood ran hot - we argued and schemed and plotted and felt the disappointment of loss and the euphoria of victory. For those few hours there was nothing else ... no clouds, no pond ... no war in Iraq, no bombs in Israel ... no birds, reptiles, oceans or stars ... the rest of life had disappeared ... my entire perception of the world suddenly constricted to a square board littered with paper, cards, two dice and a whole lot of plastic houses and hotels.
As a faint Autumn breeze ruffled my hair, I took another sip of wine and felt quite silly because it had all seemed so important.
I wondered if this is what dying is like, if only for an instant, the sudden expansion of perspective, as the game fades away, we see the bigness of everything, and realize how much the tiny little game we had played for our three-score-years-and-ten had been the master of our life instead of ourself.
All the victories and losses, the all encompassing heat of it all.
How utterly engaging it is ...
... perhaps because its the only game in town ... life, that is.
After all, what the hell else is there for us to do with all this time and energy except play the game we’re born into?
msfullphat
Reading your post , remembering my own family games of monopoly, the game, the family , the clouds forming and reforming merge into one tale. Where life and the game merge, its all a training ground for the wider horizons. After 3 incredible weeks shared with my sister , taking shifts to sit with my mother, hold her hand, sing her one of the few hymns we knew, hope rising if she swallowed a morsel of food, fading as another stroke shook her back into unconsciousness, my mother died and I whispered a promise to love my brother and my sister, to give up mayfair and pass over the fourth station as it were. To forgive and forget the hurt, the arguments, the betrayals, to remember the love and the laughter...
hey , thanks as ever for your thought provoking post and Happy, Happy Birthday.
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