We rented a beautiful ski house in Maine for February break, which we shared with another family. One night we invited a few families over for après ski featuring burgers and dogs on the grill. It was an ideal evening, with parents chatting around the fireplace (even a token injured skier on crutches - ouch!) and the kids playing down in the finished basement.
The next day, C came running upstairs to breathlessly report, “Someone carved my name into the foosball table! And,” she added, “it wasn’t me!” We called together the 4 kids who were staying at the house and checked out the damage. Sure enough, plain as day, someone had taken a dart and carved C’s name into what we would later discover was a $600 foosball table. “I don’t even make my A’s like that,” C complained.
And so the speculation began…For the rest of the week, whether as a group or individually, we all spent way too much time trying to get inside the head of the kid who had blatantly defaced property and tried to frame my daughter. “Was it someone from the group of older boys? Why would they write C’s name? Was it a boy C’s age? There were 4 of them there. Was it one of the girls?”
Before long, we were all playing detective and presenting different scenarios. And, because we had contacted all the families who were over that evening, it seemed the topic was almost impossible to escape. The “Foosball Table Caper” became the subject of chair lift rides, hot cocoa breaks, and cross-mountain cell phone conversations. “What will it solve if we find out who did it?” one of us would say. And we’d all agree not to talk about it anymore, at least until the next time the topic came up.
And, by the end of the week, what we all discovered – adults and kids alike—was that we really weren’t liking ourselves very much. We had all become suspicious of kids that we were normally fond of. We had all been focusing on the negative aspects of these ‘tween’s and teen’s personalities, and making assumptions about what character flaws would motivate such a sneaky and disrespectful act. And, thinking about each other this way seemed to diminish the good qualities in all of us.
In the end, the “Foosball Table Caper” stands as an important example to me of how one person’s act can lower behavioral standards for a whole community. Suspicion is insidious and made me, at least, doubt some of the kids I know, as well as human nature in general. We never did discover our culprit. But, one thing is certain; I will never become a detective. I don't like second guessing people and questioning their honesty. In the future, I’ll just stick to the game “Clue” and focus on Mrs. Peacock in the Billiard Room with a candlestick. It’s much easier to be suspicious of fictional characters.
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