I remember when the first graders were "the big kids".

After the day was over, we would all go outside to play on the swings, the tires, the monkey bars and the old, rotting sailboat that lay beached on the parking lot gravel.

Sometimes we would play "down the drain", a game in which we ran around chasing each other as though we were water flowing through a complicated series of pipes.

I remember other times, pretending to smoke the cigarette butts that were occasionally found in the woodchips below the play equipment. (Secretly though. We'd get in trouble if the teachers saw us.)

We used to pretend to be dead. It seems strange, thinking back on it.

One of us would lie on the ground and the others would try and figure out if we were dead, or really just alive and faking it. They would raise the person's leg and if it remained in the air, they were dead, because dead people could not control their movements. If the leg fell back to the ground, they were really alive because they had made it fall. These two rules were reversed everytime so that the person playing dead never knew which to choose.