He has glasses. Those clear-framed ones with the semi-thick lenses. This little boy, no more than 10, wears un-boy like khaki shorts and a khaki button-down top. He also has a dark brown cowboy-like hat and a plastic, play-whip. And the playground, empty, except for his sister and Isaac and me, is his own installment of Indiana Jones.
There is the giant, looming snake pit that requires strength to swing across via the precipitous monkey bars. Evil-doers and monsters plague him, afflicting him with uncounted blows as he ascends and circuitously descends the red slide. Luckily he has this whip, store-bought, long coveted and undeniably needed, especially as they surround him at the slide's delta. He manages to escape and runs, swinging and whipping his arms about, across the cement desert to the more secluded and bastioned younger-kids playground. But his enemies follow. They chase and he fends them off, deftly managing to secure the prized artifact meticulously hidden by his now tether-ball playing sister. And back he runs.
He has his own sound FX. His own soundtrack that mixes plangently with the Star Wars theme. And I am left to ponder this modal imagination. Where the jungle gyms and slides and monkey bars and swings are grand artifices and obstacles and enemies that threaten to destroy humanity. Not that I think fending off imaginary bad guys is an un-heroic task -- in fact, I imagine, a great opposite.
There is the giant, looming snake pit that requires strength to swing across via the precipitous monkey bars. Evil-doers and monsters plague him, afflicting him with uncounted blows as he ascends and circuitously descends the red slide. Luckily he has this whip, store-bought, long coveted and undeniably needed, especially as they surround him at the slide's delta. He manages to escape and runs, swinging and whipping his arms about, across the cement desert to the more secluded and bastioned younger-kids playground. But his enemies follow. They chase and he fends them off, deftly managing to secure the prized artifact meticulously hidden by his now tether-ball playing sister. And back he runs.
He has his own sound FX. His own soundtrack that mixes plangently with the Star Wars theme. And I am left to ponder this modal imagination. Where the jungle gyms and slides and monkey bars and swings are grand artifices and obstacles and enemies that threaten to destroy humanity. Not that I think fending off imaginary bad guys is an un-heroic task -- in fact, I imagine, a great opposite.
1 comment:
My imaginations in the playground were at a place called 'The City Yard,' or the adjoining junk yard of old and rusty gas tanks. It wasn't Indy there, more Tarzan.
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