Back in the fourth or fifth grade, things were much simpler. We had smaller classrooms, straightforward assignments, scheduled lunch times, music class, art class, P.E. every day and even Spanish class in the mornings on Mondays through Thursdays. All I had to do was show up on time in the morning and the rest was taken care of. Of course, this was not enough for me or the other kids I knew. We would always play little games that strangely enough, brought up the future and what we would do when we grew up. I remember there were different variations of that sort of game. You could take two people’s names and tally up the percentage love they would have in their life if they were to go out or get married eventually. You could fold a sheet of paper into the fortune-foldy thing

where you first pick a color, open and close the fortune-foldy thing again as you spell out the color, pick a number inside, open that flap and the name of your true love or future career would be revealed. (That really was way too popular, with the paper, and the folding and the obnoxious little messages waiting to be revealed. And from my google search, it looks like it’s derived from real fortune telling stuff. Way to teach it to the kids.)

Anyway, the one game that I can’t believe we actually played involved these lists of names, places and numbers (of kids you would like to have when you get married.) There were five categories:

• Name (of the person you wanted to marry. If you wanted to play it safe and not let anyone know who your crush was, you’d pick celebrities.)
• Place (of where you want your wedding to be held.)
• Honeymoon (location.)
• Home
• Kids

Each category would have 4 or 5 entries. The first two would be made by the kid who’s future would be revealed, while the rest would be made by observers, who back in the day wanted to playfully sabotage your future by saying that you would get married in a bathroom and have 20 kids. Once all these categories were filled, the person writing this down would cover their writing hand and start making tally marks on the paper until the victim would yell, “stop!” You count up the tally marks and that’s how many entries you move along these lists before scratching an entry of the list, effectively removing it from your future. If this sounds complicated, it’s because it actually was. I remember some variations of this game had your future career as one of the categories. There were all these rules about how you should list the categories, if you should make tally marks or spirals and there was even an acronym at the top of this mess that threw in about four more entries in to the mix. Was it S.M.A.S.H. or M.A.S.H.? School, Mansion, Apartment, Streets and Hell as places you would end up living in? I can’t remember now since I had to throw out memories like this from 12 years ago to make room for useless things like Navier-Stokes and Fourier transforms.

The whole thing ended up looking like this:

At which point, the person who wrote all this down would announce your future. “You are gonna marry Joey at a bathroom. You two are going to the school for your honeymoon and you’re gonna live in a trash can with 17 kids.” Laughter ensues and they move on to tell some other kids fate.

So yeah, I know these things were not real. (Please, marry Joey? I didn’t even like that kid… that much.) But you have to hand it to whoever came up with this. They encompassed the major points of the wedding planning process. The who, where and what will you do after. I have no idea how this game surfaced in my mind recently, but thinking about it now, I guess that if all else fails, I’m gonna hafta subject myself to grade school tactics. I just hope I end up living in a mansion if I’m stuck having 17 kids.