"I Guess We're Stuck With You, Huh?" "Yes, I Guess We're Both Stuck With Each Other."

At the top of the big slide, my heals lift just a bit so they don't slow my fall to the ground.

When I go down a slide for the first time, it always feels as if I am about to free-fall to the ground.  I am alone at the top--since I am an adult I rarely go to kids' playground areas when the kids are there.  My purpose in being there is not because my mom or dad brought me--or because I am hanging out with friends from school and we don't have anywhere else better to go.  I go because I want to feel apart from the rest of the world.

It is most often early morning or late at night.  It is most often because I am trying to work out feelings that I don't want to feel or am having a hard time dealing with.  I readily cry at sad movies and often cry when I read a book whose story touches me.   

Feeling angry or frustrated or . . . well, REALLY angry . . . is harder for me to come to terms with.  I want to cry because I feel sad--as if I've lost something or someone has taken something from me that I held close to my heart--but I can't let myself do it.  

Last month I got to visit with Meg--both before and after the baby came.  They didn't really need me for anything specific.  I swept and mopped the floors, washed and folded the laundry, helped Meg finish some projects she had started for their home, did the dishes and tidied the kitchen--and augmented the kitchen appliance collection so that making toast was easier for me.  Mostly I just helped the house to run smoother.

I did get to do some cool things--like work with Jon and Kate on their home school projects; build Legos with Jon; make a movie of Kate jumping on their mini trampoline; explore KIDS museum with Jon; go with Kate to an indoor collection of bounce houses where she jumped and climbed and explored places she's never seen before.  I got to hold Gloria when she was just six hours old and talk with Megan for hours.  When Anton's sister Jenny arrived, I got to play the piano while he and Meg and Jen sang Christmas carols.  

I became a fixture in the home--something like the living room couch.  Jon and Kate came to regard me as someone they were "stuck with" (Kate's words, not Jon's) when Meg and Anton were gone.  I was not a guest, not quite a parent, sometimes my rules counted, sometimes they did not.  It did feel as if I were in my own home--I padded about the house in the morning in my pajamas, ate what and when I wanted to, and used Megan's sewing machine to mend clothing.  I sat with the family on the upstairs' hallway floor and heard Anton read scriptures and had my turn saying family prayer.

I was special--but not really.  Sometimes that got to me.  It is hard to live suspended in ambivalence--and one night I left just as I had finished preparing dinner and went for a long walk in the dark.  It was cold, but not too cold.  I had my phone with me, so I wasn't cut off from family--but I turned the ringer off so it just vibrated if someone wanted to talk with me.

I found a small park playground across the street from an old elementary-school-turned-church.  In the windows along one side there were pictures drawn on cream-coloured, thick paper taped to the windows.  I could see the light squares as I sat in one of the swings in the park.  

At first I just sat there.  Not many people walked past.  Those that did pass me, didn't look up as they were hurrying home, their faces hunched up inside scarves wrapped around turned-up collars.  

I sat there for awhile, waiting for the tears that wouldn't come because my frustration was real, but not justifiable--but still REAL.  I finally thought around my feelings enough that they began to settle and as they did so, I began to pump with my legs.  I levered my body back and forth until I was high enough that I could see over the top swingset bar when I was behind it.  I wished that I could take a picture of me, so high that the swing "hiccuped" at the apex of my arc, as I paused for just a fraction of a moment before I pushed my legs out in front of me again and began the long curve down.

I saw myself in the bottom hemisphere of a unit circle--traveling from the 180 degree mark through 270 degrees and up to 360 degrees.

And who said you'd never use anything you learned in Algebra or Trig?
Math is a fourth language for me.  It gives me a specific way to look at the world that is unique--and, to me--beautiful.
My first language was English, then music, then Spanish--then math.*  

I kept swinging, at first not thinking about anything except how my body felt as it covered the range from near-weightlessness to almost too heavy to bear--over and over again.  Like the pendulum of the grandfather clock my own father built, I hung in space--measuring each beat of my heart against the physics of momentum and the laws of inertia and friction.

Then I began to wonder how long I could stay there, moving closer and then farther from the ground.  I thought about how circus acrobats didn't stop their swing at 180 and 360 degrees--but continued completely around the circle--traveling a constant path, unencumbered by the need to slow to a stop at the edge and then descend before wafting upward again.

A strange, cramped circular stairway around a pole--leading up and down from the top of the slide.  With my big, grown-up feet, I have to take cautious steps to get up or down.

Such an eternal continuum is not for mortals on earth.  My thoughts are not lofty, profound ones--but tiny pin pricks of what to do, why to do it, when to do it, how I hate to do it, why I'd like to do something else . . . I do not feel as if I rise in a heavenward gyre, borne on invisible thermals that support eagles in the sky.  

I am, rather, balancing unsteadily at the top of a strange terrestrial ladder--watching each step to see how close I am to falling every time I begin to move.

And that is enough for me right now.  Bit by bit, step by step--waiting for the time when I can move on to unending arcs of flight.

*I hope you liked my drawing.  It was the vision I saw in my head as I was swinging.   Some people see the clouds in the sky, others see the dirt on the ground--I see the degree tics around the unit circle I memorized in Trig.  In radians a 45 degree angle is imaged as the pointin an x, y plane.

Now I've used another thing I learned in Trig.