Swing Set

Brought to you by the past week.

I spent last week hanging out at Mother Media's house and bumming around my old stomping grounds. It was my first trip back to my childhood home in nearly two years, and as usual I found that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

My hometown is a small one, saved from complete rurality only by the recent addition of a Hardee's and a Dairy Queen. It's the kind of place where you're not surprised to see a convoy of unsupervised kids on bikes, or a cowboy on horseback clopping along a side street. No one uses turn signals because everyone knows everyone else's car and where it's going anyway; a new vehicle purchase can botch the system for weeks. But so many trees are missing from the street I grew up on that I almost passed Mom's house without recognizing the yard.

New houses have sprung up along new streets and new bridges cross the old river, but the old bridge my school bus used to sway across each morning is no more. Half the homes in town are "where so-and-so used to live" to me now, and most of the storefronts, including Dad's old drugstore, are "where the such-and-such store used to be." (The post office and the bar, of course, remain.) Efforts are underway to boutiquify Main Street the way they've done in the next town over, the pretty one, but so far Hometown remains the gangly, tagalong kid sister.

Oh, and the Penguin Drive-In I wrote about a few weeks ago? Gone. Razed to the ground. No one is sure yet what's going in on that corner next to the car wash, across from the takeout pizza place that used to be a beauty shop, kitty-corner from the grocery store that used to be a different grocery store (and which I still call by the wrong name, but everybody knows which one I mean). That's the grocery store where I learned to shop by watching Mother Media, and even though I live alone now, I still load my cart as if I'm shopping for a family of four.

One thing that hasn't changed much is the big swing set in the park. That park, a block from our house, was my second home for many many years. We had the city swimming pool at the east end (where I learned that blonde hair exposed to too much chlorine and rinsed too seldom will turn green), softball/soccer/kite flying field and skating rink (a banked depression flooded by the fire department each winter) in the middle, tennis courts and playground equipment on the west end. We used to hold the homecoming bonfire in the skating rink each fall, and the older kids would sneak into the warming house (a garishly painted, dilapidated shack with no door) to make out and sneak cigarettes.

The park is almost exactly half a mile around, a fact I know because the high school is just across the street from the former pool/present community center, and the track coaches sent my teammates and me running endless laps around it where they could keep an eye on us. Any time I smell the slush of a spring thaw, I think of slogging around that park wet to the knees, chest aching from the crisp air.

One high school track coach's wife was our "health" teacher ("health" in this case meaning not "sex ed lite," but "copy word for word from this first aid manual for the next two years"). She made us walk all the way down to the tennis courts a few times to try to instill some understanding of that noble game, but the effort failed because none of us was willing to (A) partake of such a snobby pastime or (B) sweat. We tried playing kickball on the softball field a few times, too, which worked a little better. However, that plan fizzled after the day Mrs. Coach got into such an intense battle of wills with one girl in the class that the rest of us simply wandered off. We went back to school; the town was boring enough that we truly had no interest in cutting class, and somebody's mom would have seen and reported us anyway.

Anyway.

Of the three main playground landmarks — slide, big swings, little kid equipment — only one remains intact. The old tall slide, the surface of which reached temperatures approaching that of Mercury in the summer, has been supplanted by a shorter and allegedly safer slide. The stairs to the top are not ordinary slide stairs, but a bulky set of stairs-on-wheels that was retired from greeting small planes at the airport. Somebody painted a few balloons on the side of the stair unit about 20 years ago, and they haven't been touched up since. It's an eyesore, but it was cheap, and when it comes to city projects, that's usually all that counts.

The kiddie play set I remember has also been replaced. The big, rickety, splinter-rich wooden merry-go-round (it was red and blue, I think), with its dirt moat worn by running feet, has given way to a smaller metal version. You can tell it's less popular than the old one because it has less of a moat. There's still a short slide and baby swings, but they face the wrong direction. The animals-on-springs toys are new, or were a dozen years ago. Loose gravel now covers the matted grass beneath these toys — which, FYI, can really mess up your footing if you bail out of a swing at shoulder height, and if it makes you wipe out right in front of your mother, you're in for a scolding.

But the tall swing set between the slide and the little kid stuff is still there. It's got to be 15 or 20 feet tall, a skyscraper. I remember the giddy feeling of accomplishment when I managed to shinny all the way up a support with spit-moistened feet (even though Mother Media forbade me to go barefoot in the park, because You Never Know), then slide down it like a real fireman's pole. I remember throwing swings over the bar to shorten the chains they hung from so we could be completely suspended, our feet not touching the ground even at the low point of the arc. And everyone knew a story about some kid who went so high that he went over the top himself.

We'd take turns twirling one another around to twist the chains tight, then get out of the way while the swinging friend spun herself sick. I had a phobia of getting my long hair caught up in the twisted links, a fear that didn't fade even after a drastic haircut. We'd try swinging face down, the thick rubber seats compressing our chests, but someone would usually end up eating a dirt sandwich before long. We'd say that two people were married if they synchronized their swinging rhythm.

Swinging on the tall swings feels the same as it did when I was eight. Better, even. Not because I've studied enough physics to nod sagely about pendula, fulcra, arcs, velocity, mass, acceleration, friction, gravity, drag, kinetic energy, entropy, and programming VCRs. No. Swinging is better now because my legs are longer and my feet that much closer to the sky.

Today around the world: June 27 is the Anniversary of the Amir's Succession in Qatar.