[3-15-07]

Avoid nostalgia. Focus instead on what has grown from the event. I do not know a tree that is wistful of being a seed, nor a labyrinth that longs to be some other forking path.

Swinging in rusted swing. Hands ruddy from the rusted chain endlessly oxidizing from children's sweaty palms; their chemical grip. Sand for braking feet and distributing impact is littered with orange peels, napkins, and the glittering foil shells of sandwiches and cookies and other playground fuels. The ghosts of traded lunches, the aluminium skeleton herds of the bulls and bears of the schoolyard stock exchange.

Fairy rings are lush amidst the yellow grass and green blades poke up along the concrete path that bisects the playground. This path demands a choice from feet that fall upon it: come or go. The slide makes a similar demand.

I stare into desolate backyards littered with faded, unnecessary toys and vehicles and furnishings that have become of only slightly less use than when they were purchased shiny. The bitterness I feel at this is fed by recognition. Green rings of grass fed by a hidden mold.

Orwell's "Why I Write" speaks of outrage fueling his writing. My relationship with words is more flirtatious. We are like childhood friends whose parents winked and nodded to each other in matrimonial conspiracy. And, like all children, we had noticed but it was just one strange thing among the many strange things and deserved no more attention than anything else that did not directly interfere with our play.

And now we've grown up and are happy to see one another but are both otherwise committed. Not that commitment really means much. It is simply the invocation of the mystical force that keeps us in one place when we wish to be in another. Like centrifugal force. Exactly like centrifugal force in that it only seems that we are being acted upon to whirl incessantly around some arbitrary center but if we remove the barrier we lose no energy and fly true along the path we were always on.