Polocrosse is a sport that combines polo and lacrosse. I spent the last six months waiting to find out that it is a joke, and have finally come around to the awful truth: It is real, and Dartmouth fields a team. Polocrosse: putting the "white" in "really f*cking white."
Polocrosse does not go far enough. Are you from Connecticut? Manhattan? Do you drive a Land Rover? I challenge you to combine Polocrosse with its rightful companions: yachting, offshore banking and an underdeveloped sense of social justice. The new hybrid will be called Extreme Polocrosse.
Team names: The Compound Interests, The Gentry, and bitter rivals The Hedge Funds and The Trust Funds. The championship match -- The Entitlement Cup -- will be held in a city whose name ends in "-shire," "-hampton," or "-chester." The trophy will be an Adam Smith statuette holding a squash racquet and a Brita filter. Other prizes will include partnerships in D.C. law firms, small donations to conscience-soothing charities and two hundred illegal Mexican landscapers. To the runners-up, bumper stickers: "The Blood of the Poor: It's What's for Dinner"; "Affirmative Action Is Adorable."
The first Extreme Polocrosse controversy will stem from an uproar over the sport's lacrosse-like rules, which will be castigated as "a level playing field" and "dependent on talent and hard work." From then on, rather than won, the championship will be inherited. The trophy inscription: "You Deserve It."
Now that I have thoroughly alienated every person who might have given me a job someday, let me say: I am not unaware of the irony here, nor of the fact that I am a Dartmouth student. Indeed, volunteering here in Biloxi, Miss., is a constant sociology lesson. The demographics of our service are simple: the volunteers are nearly all white, and the majority of the poor we help are black. It makes them no less admirable, but the volunteers are here because they are able to be -- they will never go hungry.
This context was underscored by a conversation with an old Biloxi resident with half-closed, catlike eyes. After learning that I was studying English at Dartmouth, she asked what I wanted to do. When I said I wanted to write, she laughed bitterly.
"You don't need to go to a school like that to learn to write. We shouldn't be pissing our money away on things we ain't gon' use!"
True enough; every English student has heard that. But she went on, referring to Dartmouth tuition and the poor made homeless by Katrina:
"You could be building houses with that money!"
Gulp. Of course, she was right. We hope that the liberal education is an investment, a bargain struck with a world of vast need: I will spend time and money on myself such that, upon graduation, I will be that much better equipped to do good. In this light, poetry seminars are almost immoral in their self-centeredness. It is no accident that the Hands On Gulf Coast camp we call home is full of English majors.
Majoring in English makes people assume that you plan to be a teacher. I never wanted to teach until John Beardsley and I started volunteering at a local Boys and Girls Club. After I helped a boy with a math problem, he looked up with wide eyes.
"Are you gonna be a teacher?"
"Maybe," I said.
"I wish you were my teacher. You're nicer," he said. Before I could respond, he began excitedly telling his table-mates that I was going to come back and be his teacher.
Another boy in the group is a small fourth-grader named Marley. As Beardsley said, Marley is the most gangsta person on the planet. He constantly challenges us to tag on the playground, taunting, "I'ma shake you so hard, you gon' fall to your knees and pray!"
Marley is disabled. His arms are wrist-length, his hands jutting flipper-like out of his shoulders. Still, he is charismatic and funny, the class clown. He also commands Beardsley and me like playthings.
For arts and crafts, the children were instructed to draw their names and decorate them with sports, books, or flowers: whatever represented them. Marley called me over.
"Can you draw?"
"Sure," I said.
"Get to work," he said, gesturing at his paper. "Draw ... a lion ... eatin' a man." He growled. "A lion eatin' a man's FACE!"
Outside of our service work, my relationship with Beardsley has not been all high-fives. One recent afternoon, I found him in the kitchen making five boiled eggs for lunch. When he wandered out of the room distracted, I hid the eggs in playful locations around the kitchen. Five minutes of giddy waiting later, he came back. He immediately found four of the five eggs. He turned to me, expressionless.
"Is this what you've been doing?"
I nodded quickly.
"You've been walking around the kitchen hiding the eggs. Why would you do that? "
I said nothing.
"Okay -- I'm only going to eat these four. Here's what you should do: get that fifth egg, wherever it is, and put it back in the fridge so someone else can eat it. I'm going to go eat now."
Volunteers may never go hungry, but we still have feelings, John.
