Hopscotch

Feb 16 2005
I have finally decided to call my travelogue 'Hopscotch'.

I had been thinking about the name for quite some time now... today I actually sat down to READ the BBC dictionary in search of a suitable word. And yes, I found the perfect word. Hopscotch.

Dictionary.com defines the word as "A children's game in which players toss a small object into the numbered spaces of a pattern of rectangles outlined on the ground and then hop or jump through the spaces to retrieve the object."
When I was a kid, a little game of hopscotch mattered. So did homework. Annual Sports Day. White canvas shoes. Cycling to school. Friends. My first watch. Full marks in the weekly class tests. My lucky hopscotch pebble.

I grew up. Hopscotch became history.

But did it really?
On some levels, we never really grow up, do we? Here we are, still playing hopscotch. But now, the small object is not the pebble. Pebbles are too small to matter to us anymore. We realise that the world is very big and that we are tiny nothings, trying to find our place in it. Suddenly it hits us. Our lives have become the small objects. And we toss them into whichever grid we see in front of us that catches our fancy. Hopscotch, isn't it?
But sometimes the small object does not land in the numbered spaces of the pattern we had seen. Sometimes it goes into nothingness. And then we desperately want it back! We hop through mazes and grids, and with much difficulty, we finally retrieve it. We win the game. We rejoice.

And we're ready to toss it again.

Here's to Hopscotch! Here's to the players of my hopscotch game -- my family and friends -- for helping me retrieve my lucky pebble when it landed in nothingness.

Here's to all the people who have travelled with me, and made not only each trip, but also each moment very fun, and very special.