Ally, Ally, in Come Free
Imagine Life Like 'Hide & Seek'
When I was a young boy, not yet 10 years old, without a care in the world, one of my favorite things to do was to play outside with my friends. Unless the weather was terrible, we were outside from morning till our parents called us in for dinner, then out again until the street lights came on. We all had Baby Boomer names. Jimmy Frost lived next door. Mark Lilly on the other side of him, Caroline Garibaldi lived next door on the other side, and Bobby and Johnny Wiesner lived down the street. And there were other kids nearby, on adjacent streets, always ready to play. In a pre-technology world, our way of calling each other out to play was to stand on our friend’s porch and call out their name. (Why didn’t we use the door bell?) So, there we stood, in front of the closed door, calling “Jiiiiimmmmyyyy. Jiiiimmmmyyyy.” Twice would usually get the job done, after which the door would open, and Jimmy would come out to play, or his Mother would explain why he couldn’t. When we reached a critical mass of three or four of us, we’d convene on the cul-de-sac in front of our houses, and before long others would join us.
Our favorite game was Hide & Seek. We’d gather in a circle, all on one knee with our opposite foot in front of us in the middle. Then one of us would count off, toe by toe, with each count being one of the following words:
Eeeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a tiger by the toe.
If he hollers, let him go. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
And thus was the means of determining who was ‘It’, the Seeker, the one of us whose toe was counted on the final ‘moe’. Whoever it was would close their eyes and count to 10… one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three…. while the rest of scattered to hiding spots that we could find before the counting ceased… one thousand eight, one thousand nine, one thousand ten! Ready or not, here I come!
That’s when the tension was the highest. If you were the Seeker you had to find someone in their hiding spot, and of course if you were hiding, you didn’t want to be found. Either way, the objective was to win the race ‘Home’, back to where our toes were counted. If you were hiding, and the Seeker strayed off to search in the opposite direction, you had to calculate whether you could run Home before the Seeker could spot you and beat you back. Or if the Seeker found you in your hiding spot, he had to tag you, then the race was on to see who could get back Home first. If the Seeker won the foot race, then you became the next Seeker, but before the next round started, the call would go out, ‘Ally, ally, in come free!’, which meant the coast was clear for anyone who was yet to be found to return Home.
What fun! The tension. The suspense. The adrenaline. The laughter. And though the game itself was best, I also remember well the ‘post game analysis’, the back and forth banter:
Where were you hiding? I can’t believe you walked right past me! New rule! You can’t crowd into someone else’s hiding spot! And on it went.
Most of my adult life, going back to I don’t know when, a recurring image pops into my head. It’s not a nighttime dream, and it’s not a day dream. It’s every once in a while, maybe a few times a year. It’s this: I’m sitting around with a group of friends. We’re all young adults. It’s very casual and comfortable, and safe. We’ve come back together after having lived our lives for years, and we’re sharing what’s happened, where we’ve lived and worked, places we’ve been, who we’ve been with, things we’ve learned, joys and disappointments, frustrations and satisfactions. And it’s always one of two groups I’m with, from two of the most formative times in my life. One is a group of friends from college, and we’re sitting around a dorm room, and the other is a group of colleagues I worked with in my late 20s, and we’re sitting around an office after hours. In either case, after we’re done sharing, we get up and go live our lives all over again, until someone cries ‘Ally, ally, in come free!’, the call for safe return and ‘post life analysis’. Then, repeat. The only thing missing is the ‘Eeeny, meeny, miny, moe’ part. So, it’s not a reunion, because that involves only the ‘catching up’ part. No, it’s more like Hide & Seek, complete with the exhilaration, the tension, the suspense, the adrenaline, and the laughter to do it all over again. Ah, to be a kid again!