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Two Images: Redefining Success
Sep. 18th, 2003 06:25 pmPicture this to yourself.
The park lies next to a curve of ocean, grey swells spilling rhythmically up along the beach. Cool and wet, the air is thick with the warm woodsy scent of fallen maple leaves and crisp with salt air and seaweed. Rain drifts down from the flat white sky above, settling with an almost-silent sigh into the soaked grass and across the trees. The rain falls, too, on a long board that was once painted red, its carnival brightness muted now in the light and peeling with years of weather. It's set at an angle, leaning rakishly over a green pipe that extrudes from the ground and turns a pair of right angles before plunging back downwards: a seesaw, a teetertotter, replaced now in most parks by safer apparatus.
Life isn't always safe, though, and it's so proven when a girl emerges from the mist-obscured edges of the park and climbs onto the old board. She steps on one side and walks up to the middle, to the hinge, to the balance point where she sets one foot on either side.
At first the board levels. Parallel to the ground it supports her weight restlessly, the long ends quivering with little human movements as she tries to steady it. The ends swing more sometimes and less others, quiver giving way to swing and magically, once in awhile, to a momentary stillness.
The stillnesses give way suddenly to wild swings, some little shift in balance bringing one end of the board nearer the ground and one nearer the sky. After some time the figure on the board leans into a swing: the edge splashes in the mud, the other points to unseen mountains beyond the ocean. She leans the other way, then, and the board shudders just a little as it thunks on the soggy grass. Back and forth, back and forth: it's easy to find a steady rhythm that sends those muted thunks and splashes out to deaden in the misty edges of the park. Abandoning the attempts at stasis she controls the movement now, dancing with the inevitable tug of gravity at each end. She easily achieves some kind of balance, surrendering as she does to shift after shift.
The park lies next to a curve of ocean, grey swells spilling rhythmically up along the beach. Cool and wet, the air is thick with the warm woodsy scent of fallen maple leaves and crisp with salt air and seaweed. Rain drifts down from the flat white sky above, settling with an almost-silent sigh into the soaked grass and across the trees. The rain falls, too, on a long board that was once painted red, its carnival brightness muted now in the light and peeling with years of weather. It's set at an angle, leaning rakishly over a green pipe that extrudes from the ground and turns a pair of right angles before plunging back downwards: a seesaw, a teetertotter, replaced now in most parks by safer apparatus.
Life isn't always safe, though, and it's so proven when a girl emerges from the mist-obscured edges of the park and climbs onto the old board. She steps on one side and walks up to the middle, to the hinge, to the balance point where she sets one foot on either side.
At first the board levels. Parallel to the ground it supports her weight restlessly, the long ends quivering with little human movements as she tries to steady it. The ends swing more sometimes and less others, quiver giving way to swing and magically, once in awhile, to a momentary stillness.
The stillnesses give way suddenly to wild swings, some little shift in balance bringing one end of the board nearer the ground and one nearer the sky. After some time the figure on the board leans into a swing: the edge splashes in the mud, the other points to unseen mountains beyond the ocean. She leans the other way, then, and the board shudders just a little as it thunks on the soggy grass. Back and forth, back and forth: it's easy to find a steady rhythm that sends those muted thunks and splashes out to deaden in the misty edges of the park. Abandoning the attempts at stasis she controls the movement now, dancing with the inevitable tug of gravity at each end. She easily achieves some kind of balance, surrendering as she does to shift after shift.
