|
Tapaultin'
have you seen junior's grades?
11-14
- Midsummer afternoon, early 1980's. I'm eleven, maybe twelve years old. The sun pours down like rain on the backyard of my uncle's suburban Tampa Bay home. The outside of his house was painted in the brightest white color I'd ever seen at that point in my life.
-
- Sometimes if you put your hands against the outside of his house, your hand would be covered in white dust when you pulled them away.
-
- Back in those days we all had walkmans. Back then walkman personal stereo systems were huge pieces of equipment. Mine was a silver Panasonic. The control buttons were on the side.
-
- Play, pause, fast forward, rewind...
-
- My uncles backyard; suburban Tampa, passenger jets flying overhead every 30 or 40 minutes - the grass seemed greener than anywhere on the earth.
-
- My uncle lived in a city growing as fast as it could. He lived in a planned community where the houses all seemed to look exactly the same. Carrolwood Estates, I think. Almost every summer my family would pile into the car and drive down to spend a few days at Uncle Ed and Aunt Gilda's house. They lived in Tampa, Florida in a little white house situated in a row of little white houses. They weren't especially rich, they weren't especially different. But they were far away from home, they were somewhere to go.
-
- We went to visit them almost every summer while my parents were still married...
-
- My uncle wasn't my uncle at all. He was one of my father's best friends from college. The same went for my aunt, who was in reality one of my mom's most trusted companions. They had a beautiful young daughter named Gillian.
-
- Gillian would let my brother and I play with her toys, and we all would sit together at the kids table while our parents howled and laughed between bites of food and sips of wine.
-
- Every summer we would go visit them.
-
- Every summer I would wish that if I ever grew up, I would have something like that in my life...
-
- In the backyard of my uncles suburban home, the backyard with the green grass, was a swingset. It was bright blue, and it had two padded swings and one basket swing. A metal slide hung off one end. If all the kids got on the swingset at once and started swinging, the base of the thing would start to sort of "pick up" off the ground a little.
-
- We always tried to make it do that when we visited.
-
- There are these moments in your life. These timeless places that sometimes appear in your subconscious, replaying over and over like a sports highlight caught in an infinite loop. These are the memories you can smell, the ones you can hear.
-
- These are the moments when you were truly, truly happy to be alive.
-
- not that you aren't happy now, not that you've never experienced happiness since.. nothing like that. These are the moments in your life when nothing mattered but what you were doing, where you became so enrapt in the simple motions of living that you find yourself repeating the same acts over and over, never tiring of them, never realizing the repetition....
-
This is one of my moments..
-
- It's 1983. I had an enormous panasonic tape player with the big padded earphones. Back in those days, you could buy cassettes that had separate albums on each side.
-
- My favorite tape was one of these:
-
- Side 1 -- Van Halen: Women and Children First
Side 2 -- Van Halen: Fair Warning
-
- The first song on Women and Children first is an all-out burner called "Loss of Control". During the summers while my father and my uncle would drink beer, cook steaks on the grill, and catch up on old times together, I would get on that swingset with my tape player in my pocket, and I would listen to "Loss of Control" with the volume up as loud as I could stand it.
-
- First you would put the seat of the swing up against the small of your back, and you would walk backwards until the tension from the swing chains would bring you to the tips of your toes. Then you'd run full speed until you reached the center of the swingset, where you would leap forward while pulling yourself into the seat.
-
- LEAN hard back while you pull on the chains, the swing traveling upward slowly. As it reaches the top of it's forward arc, you tuck your feet under you as tight as they would go, and lean forward with the motion of the swing as it took you back.
-
- Then as the swing reached the top of that backward motion the second time, you would KICK your legs as hard as you could, and then pike them in front of you as you once again pulled on the swing chains.
-
- kicking your legs like that never did anything to make the swing go higher or faster. Everyone knew that.
But you kicked anyways...
You always kicked.
-
- Again and again, forward and back, faster and faster, higher and higher.
-
- Even with the music blasting in my ears it was impossible not to hear the wind rushing through your hair, blowing the collar of your shirt in wild flapping patters around you.
-
At a certain point in my life, there was NOTHING cooler than riding on the swingset.
-
- The best part of the whole thing though, was having that song for a soundtrack. Loss of Control opens with this back and forth riff, rising and falling while David Lee Roth and Michael Anthony are wailing at the top of their lungs. This part would always be on while you were starting to get the swing moving. Slowly, like a roller coaster approaching that first drop, the tension would build. Then, just as your momentum was getting the swing to really start moving, the song would take off at break-neck speed, blasting guitar noise while you were racing through the air. Once you got going really fast you'd look up at the sky, and see the center bar of the swingset start to move above you, back and forth. Your pendulum motion would skew the world into your own personal fish eye lens, and the clouds would somehow wrap around your head as they raced in and out of sight.
-
- Faster, faster,
higher, higher
-
- Once you got close to that last chorus of the song, you knew it was time for the last part of the ride.
-
- While you ride on a swing, you hold your arms away from your body, while letting your hands curl around the outside of the chains. But as you prepared for dismount, you would slowly, carefully, reverse your hands so that they were on the inside of the chains, with your hands twisted around so they wouldn't get caught on anything.
-
- In reality this was a very simple process, but for whatever reason, it was the part of riding the swing that I did with the most care. Switching the hands was a slow and precise motion, and it could not be rushed.
-
- Sometimes when I rode the swing listening to my Van Halen tape as loud as I could stand it, I would call my dad over top come watch me jump off. "Watch me jump! Watch me!" I would call.
-
- Other times I would just wait for that last part of the song where everything builds up with higher and higher register notes, and then when the whole band would pause for a moment, I would edge off the seat and release the chains in my hand.
-
- How long were you ever actually airborne when you jumped from a swing...
two, three seconds?
How high could you actually go, how far could you travel before crashing back to the earth?
A couple of feet, a yard maybe?
-
-
- I don't know about you, but when I jumped off the swing in my uncles suburban Tampa backyard, the one with the green green grass and passenger jets flying overhead, it felt like I was flying forever.
-
|