Tetherball Pole

I sprinted across the blacktop in my red kangaroo shoes, spinning quickly away from the outstretched hand of  Brad Franz, as he fruitlessly attempted to capture me in our fourth grade game of tag.  This wasn't ordinary tag, but a game of epic proportions that pitted boys against girls, in a prepubescent battle to capture the most members of the other gender.  There were two rules to the game: don't get caught by the boys, don't get dragged to jail at the tetherball pole.  Brad Franz, who, on a side note, went on to be a huge jock in high school, while I took the path of the nerd, conjured up this idea with me one day at the lunch table over tater tots and chocolate milk.  At the end of every recess, we would tally up who had more boys or girls captured, and that group was the winner for the day.  If I was only tapped or brushed by someone's hand, this did not mean my immediate capture   Instead, a person had to be dragged to the actual pole in order for the capture to count.  I had ripped my neon pink coat a couple times while squirming away from dangerous hands, had suffered some scraped knees, but had never touched the gleaming metalof the tetherball pole as a captive.  I was the leader of the girls team, while Brad led the boys, and neither of us had yet been captured.  I touted my success humbly, but I considered it a great honor (and a quiet indicator) that I was an expert in the game of chase.  Yet one overcast Thursday, I decided that it was more important to show humility over pride when it comes to human connections.  A group of three frenzied girls had finally trapped Brad, two grabbing hold of his arms, and one snagging him by the waist.  Monica started dragging him towards the girl's capture spot, an orange slide, when Brad made one last flailing attempt to escape.  He torqued his body and bashed his face into the arms that were grasping her, and in the process, a rivulet of blood pooled out of his nose. We could all see that he was fighting back tears, not just from the painof his nose, but the humiliation of the capture that he had avoided for so long.   Since he had been captured and had suffered torturous pain from his captors, I decided that the noble thing to do would be to voluntarily put myself in jail.  I marched myself over to the tetherball pole, reaching out and touching the cold metal that I had steered clear of for so long.  At the end of recess, there was a tie between the girls and boys, since both had their leaders captured, and although I had tried to never touch that tetherball pole, I felt proud of my eight-year old self for putting a person before a cold and unfeeling pole. While my little competitive self was saddened that I no longer had a clean jail record, the compassionate side of me patted my back and said, "Well done."