Pong: Part 1

When I was a very young child, still learning about video games, my dad introduced me to the game of Pong.  I didn't play it on the old Atari (I wasn't that cool), but we had a version for our MS-DOS computer, and I tried it a few times on that.  I grew to hate that game.

Part of the reason I hated it, I will admit, is because I genuinely sucked at Pong.  My little 6-year-old fingers couldn't keep up with that infernal little dot, which would always seem to evade my predictions of its bounce by just the right distance.  But that completely logical reason to hate a game did not occur to me until I gained a few years.  When I was six, I believed I hated it for a different reason entirely.

I felt sorry for the dot.

I feel the need to tell you that when I was six years old, I believed everything, from rocks to trees to computer animations, had feelings.  I believed that I could hurt those feelings.  And I believed that, quite often, I did hurt those feelings.  I can trace these feelings back to two specific memories from my childhood.

Memory #1: When I was four or five years old, I had been out in the backyard all day with Dad, who was building a swingset for me to play on (ah, sweet rapture!). But Dad got tired and hungry, and went in for a snack.  Since my swingset wasn't finished yet, and since I never went inside willingly for the first seven years of my life, I thought it might be fun to build something, like Dad.

He'd left his hammer.  He'd left some nails.  In my five-year-old mind, hammering a nail into something was exactly the definition of building something!  So I took up the hammer, and I took up a nail, and I hammered the nail into a nearby cedar tree.

I remember that it was cedar, just as I remember its exact triangulated location between the garage, the firewood pile, and the half-constructed swingset, because this was the day I learned that trees could bleed.  I had barely swung the hammer three times before the nail lodged securely in the tree, and before the third swing, I noticed that something was oozing from below the nail.  It was sap.  I knew that it was sap.  But it was still gross, and I stopped hammering.

I don't have a very clear grasp on the next few minutes -- probably I was just frolicking aimlessly around the backyard singing to myself (this activity constituted most of my childhood playtime).  But I remember when my father came out.  I probably adjusted my frolicking to revolve around him, since I remember being very close to him when he realized he couldn't find his hammer.  He turned to me to ask where it was.

At this point, I didn't know for sure that I was in trouble, but I could guess that I was.  So my frolicking turned into cautious innocence, and I led him to the foot of the cedar tree, where I had left the hammer and two other nails.  It didn't take Dad very long to spot the new addition to the tree.

In retrospect, I think my father was just trying to make sure I stayed away from his tools, in case I got it into my head to damage something that would have cost money to repair.  But at five years old, you don't realize these things.  Dad pointed to the nail, hunkered down to my level, and asked me very seriously, "Did you do that?"

Whenever Dad got his serious voice on, my immediate impulses were to run and hide shamefully in my closet, or stare at him wordlessly with guilty tears in my eyes.  Once again, my complete inability to enter a dwelling of my own free will made my decision for me.  I stared at my father wordlessly, nodded once, and felt my lower lip begin to tremble.

"Look very carefully at the nail," he told me.  I obeyed.  "What do you see?"

Dad always made me talk when I was guilty.  He knew I would rather run and hide than face any wrong thing I may or may not have done.  I decided to go with ignorance on this one, so I described what I saw.  "That's where I nailed it in the tree.  And there's sap underneath."

"That's right.  And do you know what sap is?"

I shook my head.  I knew what sap looked like, but I had no clue as to its function in the tree.  This is the conversation that followed:

Dad: Rose, you made this tree bleed.

Me: You mean I hurt it?!

Dad: Yes, and you hurt its feelings too.  Imagine if a little log had come along and started hammering a nail into you.

Me: I don't want any nails in me!

Dad: Well, neither did the tree.

...

Me: Should I apologize?

Dad: Couldn't hurt.

Me: I'm sorry, tree! *hugs cedar*

Dad: Now, you're never going to make a tree bleed again, are you?

Me: *wails* Noooooooooo!

After that exchange, I was horrified.  I wasn't sure if I should ever climb a tree ever again.  Would that hurt its feelings?  Could I hide behind a tree, or would that make it feel fat?  Would the cedar tell all of its friends what I had done, so I could never be friends with any of the trees ever again?!

This last thought was the most distressing, and I actually knocked on the kitchen window and asked my mother to bring me a bandaid.  When she did, I used the bandaid to cover the sap beneath the nail, apologizing again and again.  I wanted to put Neosporin on the bandaid, but my mother assured me that trees didn't need Neosporin.

Eventually, I did climb trees again.  And I am a big believer in the usefulness of trees during hide-n-seek.  But I never did anything that would pierce the bark of a tree ever again, terrified of making a tree bleed.