Let Go

The day before yesterday my nephew came over to spend the night. We spent the evening playing videogames that were far too mature for a six year old to play and then woke up at a disgustingly early time (like at six in the morning--I've had jobs where I'd still be at work from the day before at that time) to go swimming and then head to the park.

My nephew is the son of my only real sibling, my younger sister. I love my sister whole-heartedly, but we don't get along at all. We're about as different as two people can be, starting from our respective sexes and moving all the way up to taste in music--which I have been assured is the highest form of personal expression. My nephew is a kid who's had it tough his whole life and I doubt it will ever change. When he was about three his father was killed in a car wreck and only a year or so later he was hit by a car and dragged about twenty feet by it before the fucking moron driving the thing realized he hadn't hit a squirrel. Both of his legs were broken and he had most of the skin torn off of his stomach and the right side of his head.

Fortunately my nephew, like his mother, is a tough bastard. He recovered fully from the accident and now, at age six, has more scars than I do with twenty more years of life than he does.

I say all this to set up how rarely my nephew gets to be a normal kid. His home life isn't great, his body is already marked with the permanent evidence of the rough life he has and his education has fallen behind without a doubt. When he comes to see me... well, I think it's a taste of normality for him, or at least a break from the chaos that makes up a lot of his day-to-day operations. So when I have him I at least try to do fun things with him, even if that falls to my personal vice of playing games where you shoot zombies with him.

Anyway, that's not what this entry is really going to be about. I want to talk about swings and swinging.

After a very ill-advised trip to the pool at nine in the morning and a thirty minute swim in freezing water (the temperature was a very un-Louisiana like seventy degrees that morning) we went to the park and found the swings. Like all children everywhere on the planet, my nephew loved them. I demonstrated the procedure of swinging to the maximum attainable height and then releasing one's self from the swing to fly through the air and hit the ground with enough force to injure one's self.

After that it was all we could do to keep up with his endless leaps through the air. He obviously weighs a bit less than I do, and so was able to get a whole lot more air than me.

Seeing my little nephew swing on the cracked old swings in the cracked old park out behind our apartment complex awoke old memories in myself about when I was a bit younger (and a lot skinnier) and swung five days out of the week in my middle school.

My best friend is a guy I met in elementary school, like second grade I think. We've been friends throughout all of school, college, and beyond. When  we were in middle school we didn't share many of the same classes, but we could spend time at recess together. In my middle school there were really awesome swings with chains that went up like twenty feet. It was probably actually more like ten, but in my time and size diluted memories of them they seemed to go up forever.

The swings were the most valuable resource on the recess field for kids who didn't play basketball or football (my friend and I were squarely in this camp) and I remember running at top speed from my class before recess to make it to the swings and reserve one for my friend so we could swing together and talk about Raziel or Zombies (this was before the internet was really a thing and so zombies were not as utterly beaten to absolute parody levels of doneness along with bacon and ninjas and other 'random' stuff.)

Leaping off of the swing was a thing we did not do lightly, because once you were off the swing any of the hundreds of other predatory swingers could snatch that thing up and you'd be stuck without one. There was a sort of loosely enforced system where a kid could stand in front of you and count each swing when you swung towards him. When the kid got to 10 swings you were supposed to get off of it and go to the back of the line for them (if there was one). This didn't always work out, some kids just told you to fuck off. I personally never did because I'm usually a pretty passive guy and realized it was fair for people to take turns on the swings. Sometimes if we were lucky my friend and I could swing for most of recess without anyone trying to boot us off. I remember one time in particular where a guy was trying to boot me off of my swing and my friend parted with half of his precious rice crispy treat to bribe him away. Much love, bro.

So I wondered yesterday about what it is about swings that kids love so much. Once I had taken my turn on the swing I remembered very quickly--it's the height.

As a kid you're so small and the world can seem so big. Everyone is taller and stronger than you--especially if you're a particularly scrawny, small kid like I was back in the day (somewhere in highschool I filled out and put on about fifty pounds, but even today I picture myself as a scarecrow.) Swinging is a way to rise above the huge world that surrounds you and see over the tops of the buildings, to say nothing of the tops of the grown-ups. And it's something you can do yourself. I was pushing my nephew, but he could have swung himself up and up until the chains went slack.

And it isn't just something a kid can experience. Go out, right now, and find a swing set and then swing yourself as high as you can. Now try to frown why you do it.

Okay you probably can frown while swinging through the air on a cool Sunday morning, but if you are then you're just a buzzkilling douchebag.

My point is that in this day and age of zombie killing videogames and sharing online when you take a shit in 140 characters it's refreshing to remember that you can still grin like a moron when you swing on a swing set.

The most vital part of the swinging is the dismount, though.

Letting go of the swing at the apex of it's arc and sailing through the air to land on the ground is an amazing experience--I know some people are too scared to do it, and other's rightfully claim it's really super dangerous and can end in broken bones or worse. Hell, during our outing yesterday there was one time when my nephew hopped off the swing and landed totally on his face. Like, his cheek was the first thing to connect with the wood chips around the swing set and the rest of his body just sort of lazily followed suit. For about half a second he didn't move and I thought for sure he was dead.

He wasn't, of course. He shot back up laughing his skinny ass off and wiping dirt off of his face to do it again and my heart started beating again.

I let him do it again, and again. Not everything has to be safe in the world. He knows that better than some adults.

Swinging as high as you can is exciting and fun. Letting go of the swing is exhilarating. The way you sort of hang in the air for just a moment, an eternal moment of weightlessness were you feel like you're swimming in thin air. You can feel your clothes rippling around you, your organs floating in their viscera, your whole body twisting totally free of the shackles of the Earth.

That moment is one where you really cannot frown.

You can't smile either, of course. You're most likely going to just pull a stupid face as you try to make sure that at least most of your lower body hits before your upper body.

There are lots of metaphors or comparisons I could make to letting go of the swing with letting go of concerns or life or worry or whatever the hell else, but I don't really want to do any of that.

I just want you to go out and swing.