Round and Round and Round and Round

I just got back from the school’s Fun Run. Some of you know exactly what I mean. But some of you don’t, so I’ll explain it.

Fun Runs are fundraisers. For our school, it’s a PTO fundraiser. Kids go outside and they run laps. Kids get pledges per lap - the most basic being that parents will pledge $1 per lap, up to a max of 35 laps. They get 30-40 minutes to run.

The running surface is the school parking lot. I’m terrible at estimating distances, but I’d guess the lap is about 50 meters. So if you do 40 laps, you’ve done 1 kilometer.

The thing is that at the end of each lap, a teacher must mark the big sticker on your back, so you’re not out there just running and running and running. Instead, maybe you’re running for about 2/3 of a lap, and then slowing down, and then getting into line, and then squeaking through the gauntlet of teachers with Sharpies, and then you can start running again.

While all of this is going on, there’s a DJ. The DJ mostly plays music that is not current. The DJ plays “Macarena”. The DJ plays the theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The DJ plays “Take On Me”, because nothing encourages a child to run faster better than a 35 year old Norwegian pop song. The DJ had not yet been born when these songs came out. Yes, “Macarena” is older than the DJ. The DJ of course is just playing what’s on the list to be played.

While watching these kids run and then not run and then run and then not run and how there would be swarms around one bend and then free-flowing streams around another bend, it made me think of something the name for which I do not know, and therefore cannot include a photo.

This thing is a cylinder, just a little smaller than a pop can. Inside is a plastic helix. At the top, little green blobs of liquid come out. They slide along the helix down the cylinder, and when they get to the bottom, they smash into one another and just become a green puddle. I can’t remember if this is something where you have to turn it upside down to get it to start over or not, but in mind, it was perpetual, there being something internal to the contraption which would force the green liquid back up to the top, where it would be dropped out all over again in little blobs.

The stream of children running, then having to stop, then starting back up again, felt perpetual, like the green blobs gliding down the helix, only to reach an endpoint, where they’d all reassemble, until they could resume their blobby journey.

What occurred to me after thinking about it more, though, is that the Fun Run is really just a metaphor for these kids’ lives more broadly.

They are constantly moving, constantly running. Except, then they’re not. Then, they are again. Some laps are truly sprints. Other laps are comedic adventures of their choosing, maybe involving skipping, maybe involving veering off. Yet other laps are irregular, because an outside arbiter - the DJ - declares it to be a Red Light, Green Light lap, and so the running is arbitrarily interrupted simply because someone has the power to do that. At some point there is a regrouping, which may be regular, but may also result in 14 kids in one line while another teacher stands there doing nothing. All of this happens while the outside arbiter subjects them to cultural touchstones from a different generation.

The day for the kindergartner feels like a lap. Get up, and you’re off, careening at excessive speeds, but sometimes slowing down of your own volition, and sometimes because an outside arbiter. The laps may sometimes be irregular, but the mechanism as a whole remains perpetual.

In the midst of all this, though, there’s a whole lot of waiting in lines, and there’s also the constancy of the outside arbiters, who are sometimes very helpful and friendly, but who may also be literally imposing corporate cultural bullshit on your very ears.

It is 2019. My child does not now, nor ever, need to be subjected to Van Halen.

Anyway. As a goofy dad actually old enough to have memories of these songs, my main takeaway is that kindergarten is a fine time to be alive, but we must be vigilant not to let the outside arbiters (ourselves included!) impose their bullshit on these young minds. Some structure is necessary; laps have boundaries, after all, plus markers that signify things like the time of day you should brush your teeth! Exposure to new things is also important, for the lap itself should be constantly evolving. But kids ultimately must be free to discover what they will discover - and to run at their own chosen speed.