LEARNING TO PLAY JACKS

You can use the Internet to look up information on just about anything. One of the things I recently looked up was the rules for a game my friends and I used to play at recess. It was a quiet sit-on-the-floor game that didn’t get me into any trouble. What’s more, I used to win it occasionally. The game was called Jacks.

Jacks are little pointy metal things that, according to the Internet, should not be left within reach of small children. The average six-year-old can hold ten jacks in one hand, ten jacks plus the small rubber ball that comes with the set of jacks. You throw the jacks on the floor. Then you bounce the ball. You allow the ball to bounce once and you scoop up the right number of jacks, then catch the ball before it bounces again. On the first try you have to scoop up one jack. It’s called Onesies. Then two jacks, all the way to ten. That’s called Tensies. Your reign of success ends when you fail to catch the ball, or when you fail to scoop up the right number of jacks. The winner is the person who gets closest to Tensies without getting it wrong.

I used to win at Jacks, not all the time, but often enough to keep me playing. Winning games of any kind is a real challenge for a blind child attending an elementary school for sighted children. So it’s not surprising the game of Jacks was one of my favourites. I don’t recall who taught me the rules. I just remember playing Jacks on the classroom floor with Lorna and Shirley and Loretta. I was still wearing glasses at the time, but there never was a pair of glasses that could make me see either the ball or the jacks. Since I needed to quickly be able to pick up both ball and jacks, certain adaptations had to be made. I always trailed my hand across the floor to find out where the jacks had placed themselves after I scattered them. That helped me be more efficient at picking up the right number of jacks when I bounced the ball. Then there was the problem of catching the ball. A ball doesn’t make any sound when it’s flying through the air. Somehow I figured out that I had a better chance of catching if I dropped the ball straight down and held my hand directly above it so that it would hit my hand after it bounced. This is what I remember about playing Jacks, the smell of chalk in the classroom where I sat on the floor with my friends, the finding and gathering of the jacks, the catching of the ball, the pleasure of winning.

When I search the Internet I find a set of rules for the game of Jacks. I only half expected to find it there. I wonder what sort of people look up the rules for these games on the Internet. In my day, children taught other children how to play jacks. I suppose a set of instructions might have been included with each set. I don’t recall ever playing with a new set, or being read a set of instructions. The older kids taught the younger kids. Somebody must have taught me, though I cannot remember exactly who it was.

My current theory is that I learned by observation, not being fully aware at the time that there is a difference between learning a game by hearing, and learning a game by seeing. I learned to play Jacks by hearing. I heard the ball bounce. I heard the jacks being collected. I heard the count, Onesies, Twosies, etc. And once I had observed the pattern, I played the game. I won some. I lost some. Eventually I got too old to play the game of Jacks.

It’s never too late to learn. You can keep on learning about a game long after you’ve stopped playing it. Not until my adult years, long after I had ceased to play, did I realize that there were two ways to play Jacks. There was the way played. You bounced the ball with your left hand. You scooped up the jacks with your right. As a kid I thought this was the only way. Only later did I begin to suspect that my friends were playing another way.

I suspect they were playing the way other people played, the way the Internet says to play. You bounce the ball and pick up the jacks with the same hand. That set of rules is more difficult than mine. Combine my general lack of coordination with the difficulty of blindness and I doubt that I would have won using this set of rules.

I owe a lot to the simple game of Jacks. It introduced me to the thrill of winning, a thrill I badly needed when I was a kid. When I was a kid there were parents who wouldn’t let me visit my friends because they said I would fall over things in their house. There were bullies who would wave a hand in front of my face and tell me to count their fingers. These things hurt me, but hurts don’t cut as deep into a kid who can win at Jacks.

Many years have passed since I last played, but the game of Jacks has continued to mean a lot to me as an adult. In a world where we pay a lot of attention to bullying, it delights me to tell true stories about children who show compassion, children with the grace to play a game by two different sets of rules, children who don’t mind letting somebody else win. Childhood compassion doesn’t get much attention. You think it is rarely found until you start looking for it. Once your senses are awakened you see it all the time. Older children help younger ones. Stronger children help weaker ones. They teach. They praise. They don’t get much credit and don’t expect any. They may not grow up to be wealthy. They may not be good at setting and achieving goals. But they will be the hope of a just society in the next generation.

I like to think that children are born with multiple tendencies, a tendency for compassion, a tendency for competition. Many of our systems, starting with our system of grading in schools, focus on the development of our competitive impulse. Natural competitor that I am, there’s nothing I like better than a contest I can win. But when I am walking down the street on a cold winter day, not quite knowing how to get around a huge snow bank, not quite knowing if I am on the right street to find the place I am headed for, freezing my fingers and needing assistance, I tend to become more interested in the cultivation of compassion. People will pass me by. If I wait long enough, somebody will stop to help. The competitors on their way to win a game will pass me by. The ones who won’t mind losing will stop to ask if I need them, knowing there is a chance that helping me will cause them to be late. Perhaps the differences among them were already apparent at the age of six, when they sat down on the classroom floor for a friendly game of Jacks.