The Fine Art of Playing “Piko”

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I remember one lazy afternoon when my girlfriends and I were just lounging around the house, talking and reminiscing. Now that we were all mothers ourselves, we were trading stories on family life, on our children, how expensive toys are, how different the games children play today. Inevitably, we got to talking about piko.
 
That started a flood of memories, and pretty soon, we discovered who among us ruled at the game when we were kids,  and who sucked (that was me, actually—but more on that later). We had such fun laughing over our memories, that everyone was still chuckling when it was time to go home, when  I saw my friends to the door, with my son waving goodbye to his titas. And then he popped the question.

Mom, what’s piko?

That stopped me right on my tracks.

I looked at my son and he was serious. And I realize that his ignorance is my shortcoming as a parent, after all, I have never shown him the fine art of playing piko. And so have a whole generation of parents my age, I’m sure…and whose children therefore are living a childhood that is a far cry from the one we lived.

Well, it’s only the most popular child’s game when we were  growing up, I explained to my son.  It’s the equivalent of hopscotch. You draw boxes on the ground. You have a safe place to land in the end. You get a pato.  And I went on and on—trying to explain to him what piko is.

It occurred to me of course, that I sounded like I was reciting a eulogy to piko. Piko was dead. Extinct. A dodo.

I remember the first time I learned that there was such a game called piko. It was the summer I first visited my lolo’s hometown. My “country” cousins introduced me to the game— me ,  a city slicker, who was about to have her  very first encounter with outdoor games that were played on solid earth (lupa) and involved a stone and a stick.

The stick (patpat) was used to draw lines on the ground. The stone serves as your  pato. This pato is what you throw into a box etched on the ground, and what  you have to  do is to kick up your pato  into the higher box, and onto the next, and so on, you get my drift. You just have to make sure the pato lands inside the box all the time. My cousins told me to choose the smoothest, flattest stone that can roll smoothly into the succeeding boxes without landing on the edges of the lines (doing so will mean you’re dead). But apparently, I didn’t know how to choose at all or  they knew the secret to choosing  better  than I did, or maybe my feet were just too big to fit into the boxes,  or maybe it was my scraped knee brought about by another “lampa” moment that kept me from kicking the pato higher, because they beat me all the time using their pato.

Nobody loses this much at piko, my own older sister told me. Well. I guess somebody had to be first. Blame it on the scraped knee! Good thing my mother had her ever reliable Terramycin Plus (Polymixin B Sulfate + Bacitracin Zinc + Neomycin Sulfate) Antibacterial Skin Ointment  with her. Just a little dab and lots of kisses made up for the pain of my defeat.

Fast forward to present reality. I took one look at my son, and decided that in this age of gender equality, it wouldn’t hurt to teach him piko. In fact, the best way to teach him piko is for us to actually play it!

We didn’t use a patpat, we ended up using chalk on the driveway right in front of the garden.  But we did use flat stones, picked up from the bed of roses I had (one  stone was painted silver and one was painted gold, at a moment of whimsy,  as my son and I colored them for one Christmas when he was younger).  But hey, that made it easy to identify whose pato it was. My son got the gold one, and after teaching him the basics, he was off…and playing piko like he’s known how all his life.

He beat me at piko again that day. But it doesn’t really matter because teaching the game to my son, and having us play it outside, where the wind whipped his hair out of his laughing face everytime his pato landed safely at home, that was a moment I will always remember. Enough to make up for the fact that I still suck at piko was the discovery that my son, despite and inspite of his mother’s genes, he was a natural. He ruled at piko ! And I guess, what with everything that happened that day, hey, it ‘s not game over —not yet anyway, for the  kind of childhood  that’s spent outdoors, playing such wonderful games like piko and its brethrens.

 
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