by Kathy Rusniak

Created on: January 18, 2009

Playground Trouble

Helen Dudinski was a lively child with curly yellow hair, but she was always quiet in school because she was self-conscious of her thick accent. She was only the second generation of her family to be born in the United States since her grandparents left Poland just after the Titanic sank but a year before WWI started. Helen spoke very proper English and most of the other children in her class liked to listen to her musical voice as she recited a lesson or answered the teacher's questions. But Helen disliked being different all the same and so said little more than required when in school.

Another girl in her class, Gina, was quite the opposite. She was a very boisterous girl and chatted constantly, her long brown pony-tail bobbing all the while. Her family had lived in Chicago for generations and had the casual Midwestern accent to prove it, leaving any foreign vestiges long behind. Gina seemed a nice enough girl, but the fact of their very different personalities kept the girls from interacting outside of classroom activities.
It happened that one day Helen and a group of girls were playing red rover in a painted yellow circle on the blacktop of the school playground. After a few rounds, Gina and two other girls asked to join in the game. Shortly after the new and expanded round of red rover began, Helen holding one of the less conspicuous outer positions in the wall' of linked arms, Gina began to complain that some of Helen's teammates were playing incorrectly because they moved with the players trying to break the linked arms instead of holding very still. Gina went on and on about it.
Breaking from her usual habit, Helen interrupted Gina's rant and proposed that there was no right or wrong way to play. The comment surprised and quieted the upset girl, but only for a moment. She turned, pleated skirt swishing abruptly, walked up to Helen, and started a new barrage of complaints. In addition to her original argument, she added a myriad of reasons why the matter was not for Helen to even comment on since Gina's complaint was against two other girls in the group.
Annoyed but calm, Helen raised her voice above Gina's high pitched chatter and asked her to stop shouting. But Gina wouldn't be quieted a second time, and with hardly a breath taken, continued to scold Helen at an even higher pitch with green eyes blazing and brown pony-tail bobbing and weaving wildly. To add emphasis to her pointed discourse, Gina lifted one pink tipped finder and

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