the merry go round

It’s been a strange week for me here, mainly because I’ve been so sick. I hate being sick, which I know is an incredibly stupid thing to say, because who ever gets sick and is then overcome with joy, crying “Oh hallelujah, I am ill,” really? But still. I’ve sort of been almost sick several times over the past year but then it would pass without ever really taking hold, which I appreciated greatly, so I guess it was my turn. And okay, fine, if I have to spend some time wallowing in germs and misery, then that’s fair enough, but it’s been a week now, and I am ready to move onto something else that doesn’t involve me feeling like fresh hell. (Is fresh hell better or worse than stale hell? I find that I cannot decide.)

Actually, today I feel somewhat better, in that at least right now I am fully capable of breathing through my nose and it doesn’t even whistle. So that’s progress, right? The other night I was kept awake for over an hour listening to myself whistle and rattle as I breathed. I was like my own fascinatingly horrible wind-percussion band.

Enough about the illness, though, eh? Yes, enough.

Here’s what I wanted to write about today, and yes, I’m sorry that I made you read about my whistling breathing, and I can only hope that you’ll find the will to forgive me someday. This morning, I was clicking around Flickr, which is something I do sometimes, though not nearly as much as I used to. And I came across this photo:

I immediately missed merry go rounds, because my goodness, do you remember how awesome they were? I do.

I have a long-standing love of playgrounds, because there’s a part of me that never grew up and never wants to, for that matter. Playgrounds these days aren’t the things of metal and cement that they were when I was a kid, so that if I were to swing on a swingset and jump off when I’d reached the heights, I’d probably land in wood chips instead of on a sidewalk, which is probably good, since I am decidedly less coordinated now than I was when I was six and I am no longer certain that if I were to jump off of a swing I would land on my feet. In fact, I’d probably land on my face. It’s how I do. And now I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to go to a park and take my chances.

ANYWAY.

Let’s think about the merry go round for a minute. I don’t think I’ve been on one since I was under the age of 10, and in fact, I haven’t even seen one on a playground for some time. Did playground designers finally realize that they were death-traps? I don’t know. But I miss them. I do. Remember what it was like, grabbing hold and running to get it started, running so hard that you couldn’t even keep up with yourself and you flew a bit when you were jumping on? And the metal surface, which had of course been baking in the sun all day, would burn you as soon as your legs touched it, but you didn’t care? Remember lying back, the hot metal warming your shoulders, watching the sky spin into nonsense, the trees overhead turning from trees to circles to trees again? And then you’d climb down, or jump off, unsteady, your stomach full of dizzy butterflies, your heart pounding?

I suppose there’s a comparison waiting to be made, that the fresh-off-a-merry-go-round feeling is a bit like that moment when you realize you’re in love and everything in the world shifts and stays exactly the same, yet I also suppose this comparison is unnecessary. I mean, when you think about it, almost anything could be a fair comparison to falling in love: inhaling the intoxicatingly heady scent of peonies, looking up at the nighttime sky and noticing the stars and feeling simultaneously so large and so small, being drunk at a party out in the country and grabbing onto a fence only to feel a jolt shoot through your body and realizing that the fence is electric (though maybe that last one is just something that happened to me once). I guess my point is that comparing things to falling in love is kind of tired, and also somewhat untrue. Nothing else is truly like it. Falling in love is its own thing, and being electrocuted while looking at cows is something else entirely. I know. I’ve tried both.

The merry go round is its own thing too, for that matter: running, running, jumping, spinning, skinning the hell out of my knees when I misjudge a distance and not caring anyway because I’m too busy watching the world spin out fast then slow, and laughing, laughing, laughing. Tell me, what is not to be missed about that?

Photo: Merry Go Round by Indy Charlie. Thanks, C!