Monopoly

Monopoly became an obsession for us one summer. We would play for hours that turned into days sprawled out on the burnt orange shag carpet that was so popular back then. Every one's house seem to have the same old burnt orange or pale yellow shag carpet covering once shiny wood floors. The idea that shag carpet was better than wood floors was sold to almost everyone back then. Instead of polishing the floor we would use the special rake and fluff the fibers back to life. Of course this would only delay the inevitable evidence of our existence as we marked our trails across the shag fibers. But for now we lay across the carpet and played like no one has ever played before. Deals were made and loans given to the losing players keeping them in the game. Pages and pages in old spiral notebooks became the ledgers of the loan sharks. No one ever lost a game and hardly anyone ever won. It simply went on for what seemed to us the entire summer. Sleep-overs would become Monopoly into the nights of summer. We played on. The money so worn you would have thought it had been carried in a damp wallet for years. We played on. The game would keep our minds away from the fact that most of our fathers were doing their duty in Vietnam. We played on. We were Army brats and Monopoly tycoons all rolled into one. The Williams house, where several days in a row of Monopoly had taken place, was a small three bedroom frame house, single story with the burnt orange shag carpet with a slightly musky odor. They didn't own the special rake and I'm not sure that carpet ever recovered from five or six young boys sprawled out playing Monopoly. They were the only black family on the block. Skin color was never an issue for us even amidst all the racial strife taking place in the south during the late sixties. The rioting we saw on the news just didn't apply to us. I really can't say if the game ever ended or baseball finally won our hearts back to the street diamond. I just don't know.