How Old?

 I had a moment last week that put a knot in my stomach. While combing the hillside adjacent to my school's playground, looking for balls that had been kicked with errant enthusiasm into juniper bushes, I came across a group of girls playing Red Light, Green Light. I watched for a moment, taking in the joy of youth and at the same instant cringing because of what I hoped would not happen next. My cringe was confirmed the next moment when the little girl who was acting as the stop light spun around and caught her little friends trying to advance. At which point she ran toward each one of them, pointed a finger at their head, and made gun noises as each of them dropped to the ground. Dead. 

Just like that show. The Squid Game. It's on Netflix. It's rated TV-MA. Not R or PG-13. Because it's a Korean TV show. And the kids at my school seem to be allowed to watch most everything, regardless of the rating anyway. Which is how these girls got it into their little heads to "kill" one another as a penalty for playing this beloved children's game. The joy I felt at seeing a part of my own childhood echoed in the children I teach was turned abruptly on its head as I stood and wondered. 

I wondered who was in charge of the remote control at these kids' homes. Mine is not the only school feeling the pain of grade school children mimicking this Korean import. The relief I feel comes from the fact that we have already decided that our school would forego the traditional Halloween Parade because of COVID concerns, allowing us to skip what would most certainly be a spate of Squid Game-inspired costumes. The Friday before Halloween will be Picture Day. 

And what a picture I have etched in my mind. Still.

But I also remind myself of all the things that were running through my head and in front of my eyes when I was a kid. I was nine years old when A Clockwork Orange came out. My family did not have Netflix back then. It hadn't been invented. But Mad Magazine had been. My parents did not keep me from reading their parody, "A Clockwork Lemon." Did this have the same kind of impact that seeing it in a theater, or on the TV in my living room? Probably not. What about watching Young Frankenstein with my family at the local movie house, then buying the soundtrack album and committing large chunks of dialogue to memory after repeated listenings? 

And what about all those hours spent chasing my friends around the neighborhood with a toy gun, playing a game we creatively named "Gunner" in which the object was for me to shoot all of them before they could be revived by the survivors? Toy guns stuffed into a trash can in my friend's garage, not to be thrown away, but stored like an armory. In case there was an invasion of fifty foot tall lizard creatures or Nazis or whatever scourge we could imagine firing endless machine gun rounds into on weekend afternoons. 

That was my childhood, and maybe it was only a tiny lack of imagination that kept us from shooting at each other when we played tag. 

I must be getting old to summon this kind of outrage without remembering my own past.