Let's Keep This Going!

Just as a disclaimer, please don't expect proper grammar and punctuation in this blog post, or any other future blog posts. I'll do my best with the spelling, but everything else is up in the air. Run-on sentences, incomplete sentences, numbered lists, and bullet points are all very good friends of mine, you will meet all of them very soon.

Fourth. Grade.

My final year at Woodland Elementary School.

I had Mrs. Jones.

I needed to make the final year at this school a good one.

And that's exactly what I did.

I came into the school year with a new sense of "purpose".

I had a lot of things going for me!

I was about to turn 10.

I had a killer flat top haircut.

But most importantly?

I had a Four Square Championship to defend.

My friends and I had been playing Four Square all summer long.

We used a crack in the middle of the road as one of our dividing lines.

Then we took rocks and scraped them on the pavement as our own "chalk" to make the squares.

The squares we made were AT LEAST twice the size of a regulation square.

Why you ask?

Simple.

If you can handle a square that's twice as big, then a regular square won't be a problem.

It worked.

By the time school had started, I thought they had made the squares even smaller than the year before.

That's what using squares twice as big all summer will do to you!

Everything else on the playground didn't even exist to me anymore.

Not the Seesaw.

Not the Merry-Go-Round.

Not the Swings.

Not even The Playscape (which is still the best playground I've ever been on to this day).

For me, it was all Four Square, all the time.

The game had become so popular that some of the TEACHERS were starting to play.

Maybe they thought I was going to cut them some slack.

I did no such thing.

I had fun sending my gym teacher to the back of the line.

On her very first time in, she tried to get ME out.

Big mistake.

I made her look FOOLISH.

She deserved it.

The playground was like the prison yard, it was our time out there.

Everywhere else we had to walk in a single file line.

We had to sit at desks.

We had to raise our hands.

But not on the playground.

We could run.

We could jump.

We could PLAY.

In my case, that meant diving for ANY loose ball in Four Square.

On blacktop pavement.

No protective equipment.

I scraped my elbows and my knees more times than I could even count.

But I always got to the ball, and I always got someone else out doing it.

My reckless abandon was never in vain.

Sometimes I would get that "oohhhh" or "aahhhh" reaction from the crowd.

But it was never about that.

I wasn't trying to impress anyone.

Not even my crush, because once again, she could wait.

I was just doing what needed to be done!

When I wasn't playing Four Square at recess, I would spend almost every waking hour thinking about when I was going to pay it again.

I would pretty much daydream as often as I could during the "regular classes".

Math?

Social Studies?

Science?

English?

Sure.

Is it recess yet?

Lunch was always unpredictable.

I quickly figured out which lunches were going to be good, and which lunches were going to be.....well, bad.

American Chop Suey? Good!

Weird name, especially since it's elbow macaroni with meat sauce, and I've never heard it called that ANYWHERE but on the school lunch calendar.

Sloppy Joe's? BAD!

Let me clarify, I love Sloppy Joe's.

I make them all the time.

They are delicious, WHEN I MAKE THEM.

Now I don't know what "recipe" the school was using, but those were NOT SLOPPY JOE'S.

The buns were always toasted/stale, and the filling itself was......dreadful.

Friday was always Pizza Day.

However, all pizza's ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL.

If it was the "Pizza Boat", it was delicious.

But if it was the "Soggy Brick", you'd be better off asking for an extra milk instead.

The desserts were just as "Hit or Miss" as the lunches they accompanied.

Warm Jell-O?

Not a fan.

Dry cake that's topped with a substance which was formerly known as frosting?

I'll pass.

But, there was one dessert that I'd go back to school to have right now.......

There were actually two variations of this dessert, and both of them were AMAZING.

Imagine a thick square of chocolate (or peanut butter) that's cold to the touch, but it starts melting in your hand almost immediately when you pick it up.

Inside these thick squares were two of my absolute favorite things, raisins and peanuts!

I've always wondered who came up with it, and to this day, I still want to try and replicate it!

As the year was coming to a close, the announcement I was waiting for all year was made...

The Four Square Tournament was going to happen right before Field Day!

All of the hard work in the summer.

All of the other games I could have played, but I avoided to play more Four Square instead.

It was all for this.

I was ready.

They actually made MORE Four Square courts for the Tournament, because it had become so popular!

This also allowed more people to actively be playing, instead of waiting in line, because in the tournament, every out counts, and you can't get any points for yourself while you're waiting in line, so I was all for it!

Then the day finally arrived, and the tournament had begun.

After my showing the previous year, I already knew what was going to happen going in...

I was a marked man.

I didn't care.

This is what I had waited all year for, and NO ONE was going to stop me.

I had go out out on top, there was no other option!

I got off to an even stronger start than I had the year before.

People were trying their hardest to get me out.

It was adorable.

Then in the blink of an eye, the tournament was over.

They announced the results at the end of the day.

I got 1st Place again.....but so did someone else!

It felt tainted.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

A tie for 1st Place?

What happens now?

All of these thoughts ran through my head for a good 3-4 minutes before I had a Root Beer popsicle and got over it like all 10 year olds do.

The next day, the principal from the Middle School came to my class to ask myself and a few others about Four Square.

Apparently it was becoming so popular that the Middle School wanted to add a few courts of their own, and they wanted to know how the game worked!

I now had something to look forward to in 5th Grade already, but we'll get to that part in the near future!

Until next time!

The First Time In A Long Time!

Just as a disclaimer, please don't expect proper grammar and punctuation in this blog post, or any other future blog posts. I'll do my best with the spelling, but everything else is up in the air. Run-on sentences, incomplete sentences, numbered lists, and bullet points are all very good friends of mine, you will meet all of them very soon.

Let's see, it looks like my last blog post was just under........6 months ago, no surprise there.

Unfortunately, that is to be expected of me.

I put the "Pro" in Procrastination, that is for sure, but I'm working on it.....at least I like to think I am.

Anyway, I believe the next logical thing is to continue telling the story known as my school career, which means we have now arrived at 3rd Grade.

This is when the gloves started to come off.

I'm talking about multiplication, and even worse than that......long division.

They were both foreign to me, I initially thought they were forms of torture.

9 x 7?  8 x 5? What is this? Why do I need to know this?

I'm supposed to get to the point where I'll know these answers right away?

That's impossible! (Spoiler, it wasn't impossible, but I was 9, so what did I know right?)

Eventually, I got the hang of it, but I really just wanted to play outside, I was a kid after all.

But it was more than that.

I had found something that had completely taken over almost every train of thought I had.

No, it wasn't my crush at the time, she could wait.

I'm talking about.......Four Square.

I didn't think anything could be that fun, but it turns out that I was wrong, because it was THAT FUN.

So simple, yet so addictive, those are the best kinds of games.

It's a simple premise really, four people stand in a giant square, that has been divided into four smaller yet equal squares.

The squares are lettered A-D (clockwise from the top left), and whoever is in square "A" is the server, that's the square that everyone wants to be in, which means everyone is gunning for you, and that's what I wanted, so it was right up my alley.

The server bounces the ball once in his/her square, and then they hit it with their hands to one of the other three squares.

The person who just had the ball hit to them has to let the ball bounce once, and then they need to hit the ball to any of the other three squares.

If you cannot complete that action for one of many reasons (the ball bounces twice, the ball hits you, you hit the ball into your own square, you hit the ball out of bounds, you hit the ball on the dividing line of the squares), then you are "out".

Whenever someone gets "out", they leave their square, and everyone moves up a square, so if the person in Square B got out, they would have to vacate their square, and go to the back of the line, and the person in Square C would move up to Square B, then the person in Square D would move up to Square C, and the first person waiting in line would now move into Square D.

The goal is to make it to Square A, and try to last as long as you possibly can, the server has the biggest advantage because they can choose to hit it to whoever they want to start the game.

This is the playground we're talking about here, so the line to play this game was always LONG.

And I'm not talking about what might have "seemed like a long line to a 9 year old", I mean it was ACTUALLY LONG.

It was always a full on sprint to be one of the first four people to get there, so you could guarantee that you would be one of the first four to be able to play.

Square A was always the top prize.

If you couldn't get A, then you'd go for B, then C, or D if it was the only one left.

If you got out, sometimes the line was so long that you knew the bell was going to ring before you even got a shot again, but I still got in that line, because I wanted to be THE BEST.

Now of course there were going to be alliances, sometimes me and one of my friends would have Squares A and B, so we would never go after each other, and instead we would "set each other up" to keep getting the people in Squares C and D out.

Sometimes I was that person in Square C or Square D, going up against such an alliance, and that pretty much meant I had one shot to try and get one of the two people in the alliance out, or I was probably going to be knocked out myself.

Those were the moments I lived for, I also scraped my knees for them, it was amazing.

After playing for months nonstop, the school announced that they were going to have a FOUR SQUARE TOURNAMENT.

It was music to my ears. 

Each grade would have their own tournament.

For the first time, we had actual "judges".

You see, as with most playground disputes, you try to present your best case for why you should or shouldn't be out, and if you are persuasive enough, you get the magic words you were really fishing for in the first place - "Let's just do it over".

There was none of that in the tournament.

Whatever ruling the judge made was FINAL, no arguments would be heard.

It was black and white.

I liked it.

I liked it a lot.

The battle lines were drawn.

Any "Alliance" that I had was put on the back burner come tournament time.

My friends and I all knew the same thing, there could only be one winner.

It was nothing personal, and we all promised not to hold back against each other.

The tournament rules were pretty simple, any person that you got "out" counted as a point for you.

Whoever had the most points at the end of the tournament would be declared the winner.

You wouldn't know how many points you had until after the tournament was over, and the Top 4 would be announced for each grade.

The Top 4 people in each grade would all get a prize, but they didn't tell us what the prizes would be.

The prizes didn't really matter to me, all I wanted was to be THE WINNER.

Then the tournament began.

It lasted for two days.

When time was up, the judges said they would tally up the scores, and make the announcement of the winners for each grade.

They announced the Top 4 for 1st Grade.

They announced the Top 4 for 2nd Grade.

Then they announced only 3 people from my grade.....and my name wasn't one of them.

I was confused.

I was hearing the point totals for the people in my grade, and I thought I did better than all of them.

They announced the Top 4 for 4th Grade.

I was still confused.

Why did they only announce 3 people for my grade?

Did I miss something here?

And then it happened.

After a brief pause, I can still hear it in my head now just a clear as when it was originally announced over the school speakers, "The person with the highest score out of all grades was Jerome Yanford with 76 points".

I guess I did better after all.

I had thought I did pretty good, but I didn't realize it was THAT good!

My whole class looked at me, I didn't know what to do!

So of course, I smiled, like I was going to have my school picture taken, and I stayed that way until the shock wore off.

It felt like forever, but in reality it was probably like 10-15 seconds before everyone went back to, well, not staring at me.

As for the prizes?

They were Four Square balls!

However, since I got the most points, I got the first pick of the many color variations that they had, so that was cool, I took the green one.

That's where my love of Four Square began, and it would spill over into 4th Grade the following year, but we'll get to that soon enough...........

Until next time!