On a cops-and-robbers show that I was watching, police cars are chasing a suspect who is driving on a golf course. One officer barks into his car’s loudspeaker, “pull over and park!” The officer adds to his partner, “just stay off the green.”
When I was in grade school, there was a casual agreement about the occasional bouts of combat between students. Should the need arise to resolve a conflict by engaging in fisticuffs, the combatants agreed to “take it to the green.” As I indicated in an early column about my personal “Fight Club,” the green that the pre-teen fighters from Henry Clay Frick school used was at the corner of Terrace and Darragh streets in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That green slab of grass was in front of the Jonas Salk Institute, and while researchers inside continued to refine vaccines for diseases, grade-school boys grappled on the grass in front of the laboratories. Long after I graduated from Frick School and entered Schenley High School, “taking it to the green” was a signal for combat, even when the green was gravel. (I still have a gravel-induced scar on my left knee to remind me to always go green.) After a long hiatus inspired by a need to limit the possibility of exposure to Covid-19, I have been taking it to the green again. This green is not my grade school combat green. This is the green felt of a pool table.
I dipped my toe back into the pool (see what I did there?) at a pub near my house. I have been taking it to the green on the tables in a place ironically named Greene. I met my friend Ken Collier-Magar at Si Greene’s on Monday, August 29. Ken does not shoot pool, so he brought a ringer, a man named Dave. Dave and I tested each other’s skills on the green and it felt good to be in that non-combative type of contest again. But, to paraphrase Kermit the Frog’s “Sesame Street” song, “It’s not easy on the green.” But for me, it feels good to be back on the green.
On a recent November amble through my neighborhood, I saw on someone’s front lawn a perfectly groomed green circle of golf-course-like grass in the middle of brown rubble. It was reminiscent of a putting green, but my thought was from Dylan Thomas’ poem, “Fern Hill,” and this line: “Time held me green and dying…” When I was young, taking it to the green was the way to resolve conflicts. We marched up Terrace Street past the psychiatric hospital (where I would later serve as an attendant) and met on the green. A crowd of grade-schoolers would gather around us as we squared off, hands up. We used our fists; there were no guns involved. No one died from a fat lip or a black eye. Should we wrestle off the mat and onto the concrete, we would break our holds and move back onto the green.
As Thomas Paine wrote, “these are the times that try men’s souls.” (And women, Tom. Women, too.) How nice would it be if we could take it to the green and wrestle our problems to a gasping, grunting and sweating agreement? The resolutions from the green of my youth had neither winners nor losers. We were just done with the wars. But these are indeed, trying times, and too many loins are girded for battle. I take it to the green in a gentler environment these days. And my conflicts end with these words:
“Eight ball in the corner pocket.”
cjon3acd@att.net