gozzterLeave a Comment on Monkey see, monkey do…

Monkey see, monkey do…

I revisit my childhood from time to time, especially now that I’m retired. Apart from the fact that it’s something to occupy the time, it also makes me wonder if I am still capable of childish feats -as long as nobody is watching, of course. I fully acknowledge that as an aspiring octogenarian, I am forced to be careful; I do not have the strength, let alone the balance of my youth, but that gives me a certain advantage, don’t you see? I can plan my activity ahead of time rather than relying solely on whim; I can vet the route, decide the appropriate methodology, and if I see a child making an naïve but innocent mistake I can learn from their misadventure.

In addition to the pick-up baseball and soccer games in my youth for which there was always an argument about who had to choose me for their side, my favourite thing to do as a child was climbing. I could clamber up a tree without being chosen; walk across a log without falling in; swing on a branch without my fingers giving way. I was a different me then; it was a different life, I suppose: different priorities; there were no bullies up a tree, so it was a perfect hidden platform from which to hurl clever sesquipedalianisms at them.

I don’t climb trees as easily anymore, but I still have difficulty walking past a jungle-gym and its monkey bars without giving them a token attempt. It’s no doubt the primate in me, but as I understand it now, the original concept of the grid of bars was built out of bamboo by a Princeton mathematician in his backyard to teach his children to visualize space in three dimensions as they moved through the structure.[i] The children, however, regressed to more simian stage and, like a troop of monkeys, began to swing through it as if they were in the canopy of a jungle tree.

I always enjoyed those jungle-gyms in the schoolyards of my distant past. In early post-diluvial Winnipeg, however, the earth beneath the bars was not covered by protective sawdust, or its current iteration of some sort of shock absorbing foam padding -it was gravel at best, and irregularly sized rocks mindlessly dumped there at worst; nothing else could survive the snowy prairie winters, so we all learned quite early to be careful how we swung or balanced; the stories, however apocryphal, of broken necks and horrid, bruising deaths from falling were never far from our minds. It did nothing to keep us from daredevil feats of prowess at recess, though.

Some have even gone so far as to attribute the development of our adult fine motor skills to the lessons learned by the survivors of the bars, but I’m not so sure I believe everything that James tells me. He’s one member of the varying group of elders that meets Wednesday mornings at the Food Court. For most of us, it’s merely an escape from the domesticity inflicted on us after our retirements; for James, however, it was a chance to enlighten the rest of us as to what he’d managed to learn about Life -okay, about himself– since the previous meeting.

Last Wednesday, for example, while the rest of us bantered and heckled each other, James seemed unusually quiet as he concentrated on writing something on a napkin. When I happened to glance at it, I noticed he was filling it with curlicues which, upside-down as they were for me, resembled linearly-arranged doodles.

He noticed my curiosity when he happened to glance up from the page to see if anybody else was looking at him. It was the opportunity for which he had been waiting, I suspect. “What do you think these are?” he said in a loud voice and pointed at his napkin as he looked around the table at our raucous bunch.

Lenny’s eyes immediately went skywards. “Another bit of poetry you’ve remembered from high school… Again?”

Lenny had an uncanny ability to italicize spoken words, and it didn’t go unnoticed by James. He smiled and shook his head slowly, obviously disappointed in Leonard’s acumen. “Of course it’s poetry, Len… But look how I’ve written it, eh?” Jamie could match italics with the best of us.

Lenny leaned over the table to inspect it more closely. “You mean all the little squiggly things?”

It was Jamie’s turn to roll his eyes. “It’s an example of fine-motor skills, Leonard… finely-tuned motor skills, I might add.”

This caught George’s attention, and he broke off his verbal joust with Jason, mid-argument. George was our resident expert on all things scientific; he was a long-retired professor of engineering, granted emeritus status from the University by mistake we all told him. “And to what esoteric methodology do you attribute these skills, if I may enquire?”

A big smile suddenly surfaced on James’ face as he sat back in his chair, ready to enlighten us with his latest theory. “The monkey bars, of course.”

George’s lips pressed tightly together, as I’m sure they used to when one of his students came up with what he considered a ridiculous answer to a question he’d asked the class to consider. “Would you care to elaborate on that, James?”

James was in his element; everybody was now leaning forward across the table to hear him. “I think we can all agree that a jungle gym can be dangerous for children…”

“Which is why we put sawdust, or rubber mats under monkey bars,” Jason suggested with a little wry grin.

“More likely polyurethane,” George added to show that, although retired, he was still an up-to-date engineer.

Jamie’s grin was enlarging as he realized that he was still the centre of attention. “All true, of course… but what is it that the absence of those protective materials engenders?”

I could tell by his expression that Jamie must have been proud of that word, or he wouldn’t have italicized it.

When nobody volunteered an answer, he rolled his eyes again as if he was disappointed in their intelligence. “When there’s no protection under you when you swing from bar to bar, what do you do…?” He thought he’d give them another chance to redeem themselves.

“You don’t go on them in the first place.” Jason was an obvious advocate for safety.

“Then the kids won’t learn anything, Jay… It’s only when it’s do-or-die…sorry: I mean do-it-right-or-fall that they pay attention to how carefully they traverse the bars, eh?”

“And, just how are you going to tie that into your napkin doodles?” George just had to try to get in the last italicized word -a matter of pride, I think.

“Fine-tuned motor skills, learned and absorbed from an early age, George.” Jamie glanced around the table to see if there were any dissenters, but, probably disappointed in his answer, they were already beginning to argue about the TV documentaries they’d seen since last being able to argue with each other.

I could tell that Jamie was frustrated at the lack of interest in the point he’d been trying to make, but since I was the closest to him across the table, he pushed his napkin closer to me and turned it around so I could read it. Then, shrugging at the group, he waited for my response. Doing is learning, it said. “See how the letters curl and swing from the lines like I learned to do on the bars?” he asked, pride shining in his eyes. Quite frankly, it just looked like the plain old-fashioned italic font he’d tried to imitate in his speech. Must have been hard to do that in cursive though…

Still, I quite liked it and nodded my head in appreciation. “I may try to learn to write like that,” I said, and reached over to break off a piece of the doughnut on his plate while he was basking in my approval. “But, I spent my youth on the bars learning how to do things with my fingers like this,” I added in my best imitation Italic when I saw him stare at the size of the piece I’d taken.

[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-monkey-bars-180981556

, , , , ,

Leave a comment

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close