Nonfiction by Candy Hamilton
As I take notes on Latin influence in Indo-European languages, playground noises easily distract me. On the school playground across the street, a dozen or so kids are shifting in some ad hoc football game, full of passes and soprano yells. Long after the bell shrills over the thuds on the playground. Mostly the voices blur, but now and then from my living room rocking chair, I distinctly hear, “No it didn’t go out. No we don’t need ’em.” I have much more to do than watch youngsters celebrating a warm fall day, but nothing better to do than watch surrogates for my grandchildren three hundred miles away, so I lean forward in my chair to peer through the storm door window.
Two kids weave their bicycles through the ad-lib formations without bothering the football players. I’m watching two ballet performances winding through each other. One boy, (They are all boys, I think) taller than the others, already has that loose-limbed walk that comes with adolescence and for some never disappears. Slack arms pumping faster, more flowing than his legs, he moves as if his muscles and bones float in water. He knows nothing about gravity, and his shoulders have a life of their own.
Finally a smaller boy actually catches the ball and runs triumphant toward the fence—straight toward me. If he knew I was here, now standing behind the door, perhaps he’d leap the fence, the road, score his touchdown through my front door. Green Bay style. Perhaps he’d prefer to leap the tree where the birds and squirrels make up the cheering section, or perhaps they sound more like coaches cussing and raising hell over so many dropped passes.
The kids don’t have a running game except for chasing the ball bouncing in its oval wobbles around the paved playground. A break in the action, and finally I notice the empty parking lot—no school today. These boys have scrimmaged through a perfect unending recess while I dreaded the arrival of teachers or a principal full of discipline.
Then the kids start a kicking game, pretty much straight up straight down, so that one kicker catches his own punt—the only catch in this game. Nobody cares. They just want to run, kick, and yell the freedom of their day-off. The bicycles join two rollerbladers, a moving horizontal backdrop to the vertical kicking game.
One last thud and the players disappear, only their voices (words even less discernible) walking back through the trees. They wander off in all directions, pairs, threesome, a little round one churning his legs to keep up, three spans of his legs to the others’ steps. Only the squirrels and birds and I remain to consider an empty, silent playground. Now so many distant words run together, they are like silence; the same as the blend of squirrels, birds, refrigerator hum, my breathing, the occasional turning of a book page, no silence at all.
Having celebrated the freedom of ignoring school bells, the kids go home to complain they have nothing to do. I do not have to hear those words to know they say them.
Candy Hamilton, an award winning journalist and poet, has also published essays and short stories in many literary magazines and national publications. She lives in Rapid City, S.D., with three rescued dogs and a ridiculous number of books.
