During the pandemic lockdown in L.A., we walked around the neighborhood a lot. I started to notice hopscotch boards: hopscotch boards drawn in chalk, hopscotch boards power-washed onto sidewalks, hopscotch boards on the news. When I keep seeing recurrences of something, I have to think there’s a story there.
Actually, there were three.
Life Question
What was it about hopscotch that people connected to during a pandemic?
I spoke to one of the couples that power-washed a board onto their sidewalk. It was the wife’s idea, but the husband, who did the power-washing, loved it. They said they wanted to make people smile when they saw it. And I definitely did. I smiled when I saw all the boards.
Though I didn’t play hopscotch as a kid, it’s always been appealing to me. The numbered order of it and how you work your way through the squares and back. The repetition and rhythm seem almost meditative. It’s what you need during a lockdown. It represents a simpler time.
I think there’s also an element of sadness to hopscotch. You still see hopscotch boards painted onto the asphalt of some playgrounds. I don’t remember seeing someone using one. I imagine it’s the last resort of an elementary school kid who didn’t have anyone to play with during recess. That fit with the pandemic, too.
Research
Origins of the Game: Three possibilities
Training course. It was reportedly used as a training course for Roman soldiers. Courses could be 100 feet long.
Path to Heaven. Hopscotch may have started in China. The lines represented life obstacles. The rock represented your soul. The “10” was heaven. If you completed all the squares, you overcame your obstacles, and your soul made it to heaven.
Rite of Passage. It’s also thought to be used as a rite of passage in some countries. The square and lines represent trials and one’s ability to pass them.
Attempting to Play the Game
I had to look up the rules. I’m not sure I actually ever played the game. The basic rules are below, but there are variations. One variation rules that any player who successfully gets to 10 can then claim a square by initialing it. The game ends when all the squares are initialed. The winner is whoever claimed the most squares. I love that idea.
Rules
Object of the Game. Progress through the board from squares 1 to 10. Don’t touch any lines. You want to “hop” the “scotch/scratch” (i.e., line).
Step 1. Draw a board.
Step 2. Find an object.
—A rock is good, but not round, otherwise it rolls too much.
—A glass bead, like the ones used in flower decorating, is a disaster. But pretty.
—Small beanbags work.
—If you want to get super fancy, use a special hopscotch chain, like my husband’s cousin used. She described it as a small ball-type chain that clasped together. It was about the size of a keychain.
Step 3. Throw the object, starting with the number 1 square. Your object cannot land on a line. It must land completely in the square.
Step 4. Jump through the course, using one foot if there is only one numbered square in a given row, and two feet when there are two adjacent squares. Do not jump on the square with your object in it. It is temporarily off limits.
Step 5. Turn around at the 10. On your return trip, pick your object up, jump in that square, and return to start. If the player steps on a line at all, their turn is over and they have to repeat with that number. If they make it through safely, they try for the next numbered square.
Step 6. Take turns until one player reaches 10.
Benefits
Besides teaching you to improve your footwork as a soldier, there are lots of benefits:
—gross motor skills
—fine motor skills
—balance
—social skills
—adaptability
—discipline
Outcome
My daughter and I started out playing with glass beads. They were impossible to get into a square. We spent more time tossing than jumping.
Next we found rocks. Those were definitely better, but they still often didn’t land where we wanted. And when we did manage to hit the number we were aiming for, we often screwed up on the jumping.
Reaction. The game is pretty hard.
Confession. We didn’t make it through a whole game.
Conclusion. There’s a reason why the hopscotch boards at playgrounds are empty.
The Other Kind of Hopscotch
Hopscotch also happens to be a coding app for kids. We have it on our iPad. I tried the app out when we first purchased it years ago, but hadn’t touched it recently (and neither had my kids). So I played around with that, too. It took me a bit to pick up on the rules. But the name of the app is completely fitting, I found. Hopscotch the app definitely had parallels to hopscotch the game. It was repetitive and step-by-step and it had a similar meditative quality. So I incorporated Hopscotch the app into one of the stories I wrote.
Fiction
I got three stories out of my hopscotch musings. Two longer stories (see below), which I submitted to journals for publication, and a short short (Quik) story as follows.
Quik Story: B is for Barbed
It got so bad that they took shifts in the kitchen so they wouldn’t have to see each other. He was out of work and Barb was out of her mind, first with the sourdough bread baking, then with the chocolate tempering, and now quilting. There were four quilts spread out in various states of unrest over their 900 square feet of house. They weren’t going to make it, he concluded. Thirty-seven years of marriage and it wasn’t death that would part them, it was quilting.
He needed to power-wash something.
The sidewalk ran between the house and the gate. The cinder block sat at the gate end, where the cement widened into a kind of threshold. He used it to hold the door open for repairmen. When they could afford repairmen. He started there, at the block, but didn’t move it. Barb was always telling him to move it. But the exterior was his domain. So he washed around it out of spite. And the spite and anger were a comfort. And the spot of old blood on the corner of the block was a comfort, too, in a strange way. Their son had stubbed his toe on it, ripped the nail clean off. It was during the brief month their son had been sober. By the time he noticed the stain, the month had passed and it had permeated the pores of the concrete.
He liked the rough scraping sound the block made as he pushed it aside. He expected there to be collected dirt underneath, pill bugs maybe. But he didn’t notice that. He saw a circle of clean cement and a dark rectangle at the center where the block had been. And the dark rectangle resembled the quilt scraps that had been cut from their son’s fine wool suits. And it reminded him of the rectangles he’d cut out of construction paper when he showed his son how to make block letters for his U.S. state presentation in fifth grade. Make some letters and you built yourself a word, he recalled saying. Make some more and you had a heading. Cut them large and you could string them together in a banner: Happy Birthday. Happy Graduation. Congratulations on Your First Job.
Make enough of them and you could build yourself a whole life. Or end one.
The spite and anger sputtered. He was an engine choking. He reached for the cinder block, started to pull it back over, and stopped. What he saw was so simple as to be profound. The block looked like the letter B.
B for Barb.
You have to face the truth, she’d told him. And this felt like truth.
The sidewalk was dirtier, darker where it narrowed and began its run to the house. He set the block there, where it would show up best. He washed around it again, but this time he washed the two holes in the middle of the block, too. When he moved it, there was a letter B on the cement sidewalk.
B for Barb, like the barb on a barbed wire fence. B for Barb that you had to handle just right or she punctured you. B for Barb that didn’t break. Just baked and tempered. Quilted. As if cutting up their son’s clothes and piecing them back together in those Frankensteinian creations would make him whole again. As if the patterns—Triangle Jitters, Flying Geese, Drunkard’s Path, Road to Redemption—could redeem him.
You have to try, she’d told him.
He positioned the cinder block to the right of the B and washed around it again and in the two holes. When he removed the block, he power-washed the dark line at the bottom to make an A.
Barb, who had no right to cut up his shirt, the one he’d been wearing the day their son died, and put it into her quilting squares. She’d shrugged. She’d cut up her shirt, too.
We never wore them, she’d said.
He shifted the cinder block over again. He made another A and then washed a notch out of the right side to turn it into an R.
What didn’t kill you made you stronger.
He moved the block again to make another B. BARB.
She was stronger. He hadn’t decided which way it would go for him.
And then he washed the rest of the sidewalk clean.
By the end, he knew she was watching from the kitchen window. Thirty-seven years had taught him the way the air charged when she fixed her eyes on him. He switched off the machine and took his time shutting off the water, removing the hose, wrapping the cord up around the back. He was nervous. Like that day when he’d found her sitting on the swings near the hopscotch boards. He was nervous, but he turned. He faced her.
It was only them that day at the playground and it was only them now. Then he was nineteen and had his whole life in front of him and he’d wanted Barb in it. Now his whole life was Barb and he felt the vulnerability of that closing in. All his eggs had shifted to one basket.
He put his hand over his heart like he’d been shot by an arrow. It was a risk then and a risk now. He opened his arms wide.
Her eyes flicked down to the sidewalk. Her hand came up off the counter. It floated in front of her like a divining rod. She raised her fingers to her lips and then pressed them to the window. She held the kiss there until he clasped his hands together and caught it.
He put the power washer in the shed. He put the cinder block in, too. He’d taught his son the importance of cleaning up after yourself, to finish what you started.
And then he went in the house to begin again.
Longer Stories
Story 1. About two girls, best friends. The poor friend envies the rich friend’s hopscotch chain, which has a sapphire on it. She wants it above all else. Until her mother wants to marry her rich friend’s father.
Story 2. A 27-year-old editorial assistant has a mysterious rash on his toe. It moves like a worm. In desperation he turns to his neighbor upstairs and hopscotch (the game and the app) to rid himself of it. And his habit of lying.
Sources
Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Hopscotch.” Accessed October 5, 2020. www.britannica.com/topic/hopscotch-game
Mailar, Sahana. “Hopscotch Game: Everything You’d Want to Know!” Hopscotch (blog), December 11, 2019. www.hopscotch.in/blog/hopscotch-game-everything-you-would-want-to-know/
Sports KnowHow.com. “History of Hopscotch.” Accessed October 5, 2020. https://sportsknowhow.com/hopscotch/history/hopscotch-history.shtml
Tan, Bonny. “Hopscotch.” Singapore Infopedia. Accessed October 5, 2020. https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1731_2010-11-26.html
Whittier, Karen. “Why Playing Hopscotch is Important.” Play & Grow, November 11, 2016. https://playandgrow.com/playing-hopscotch-important/
