The next door neighbors have turned off the radio and the birthday party across the way has silenced the karaoke. The neighborhood sounds are winding down. They have not ceased they are simply responding to the rising moon by allowing quiet into the night. Soft music can be heard in the distance and mothers calls their boys inside. Only one boy is left. The back light of his porch illuminates his backyard basketball court. He bounces the ball, swivels right, than left, he shoots and misses. The ball bounces into the shadows and he quickly retrieves. Again, bounce, bounce, swivel, pivot and shoots. He makes it with a swoosh. The ball bounces back to him and he jumps up, grabs it, bounce, bounce, bounce.

This is a lonely boy. He is not called inside. He turns off his back light when he wants. He roams the neighborhood streets. Sometimes he is picked on but mostly he remains on the outside of the group, simply waiting to grab leftovers of play from the gang.

This is a street of many kinds and the children here play hard with one another. Some of them are simply playing. Some of them however, seem to be playing at playing. What do I mean by this? I mean that some of them play so hard that it is a kind of labor - not work, for they do not produce beyond themselves, nor do they create something in their play. But it is as if, for some of them, playing is difficult, hard, mean and cruel. They labor as the factory man labors, as the retail store manager labors, as the school teacher in the testing society labors. Their play is a tool for getting into the group, for getting fed, for having amusement that doesn't occur within their houses.

They are different than the children who play. Children who play are light. Children who play dance with their words and throw the ball because throwing the ball feels good. Children who play go beyond the world of this street. Their eyes are sparkling. They feel joy and not simply pleasure while playing. They will probably not remember all the balls that they will throw because children who are playing are already moving into the future. They have no need to remember what it feels like to cannonball into the pool because the next cannonball splash is already forecasted.

But yet, on this street (as is probably the case in many of the streets of the world) the children who labor at play and the children who play are thrown together in pools, streets, and backyard courts. And while the children who play at playing are very good at what they do. They work hard to be players the children who play know the difference between they and them.

So it is not strange that when seen in the shadows playing basketball by himself that this boy seems lonely, without friends, even though he played outside my house all day with 12 other young boys. To live in the world as a laborer is to live a hard life. It is to be grounded daily. It is to live without spirit without movement towards the future. It is to live without hope and without care.

The difficulty will be is that as adults this loneliness will pervade all our lives. We will all become laborers -we will labor at play, we will labor at work, we will labor with each other.

This is not to say that we must recover our childhoods. To do so would be to labor at play, to play at playing. We do grow up. We are not children. We must labor. But I think if we do not begin to question how we play we might be missing something about ourselves that is very important.