Playtime
Copyright©2004 by Cocomo Rock  All rights reserved.

      Have you never caught a glimpse of me?  I run on the winds of memory and presence.  I sing within the columns of the crystal palace that sits at the crossroads of eternities.  When you hear my voice, it is a blend of the harmonies that chronicle your story from beginning to beginning, having no end.  You have heard me.  You have sensed my presence at your shoulder, like a breath of the familiar, in that fleeting moment when you were finally sure that your world was right and good.  I am always with you.  I will never leave you alone.
      It might have been just yesterday.  I stood there, watching and recording.…
      Each day, after school, the dirt yard around the quadraplex of identical, three-room apartments swelled with the glee of the neighborhood’s children.  The sound of their laughter bubbled up from their young bellies.  It gushed out from innocent throats and rolled across the sweetness of their tongues and lips.  In its passing, it splashed the world clean with the sparkle of youthsong, the sound of playtime.

      The boy inside the downstairs, front apartment had chosen four of his most favored marbles to bring with him.  He would not be going outside today. Mama was punishing him for coming home late from school again.

Two of the chosen marbles were the extra-large kind the kids called “bummies.”  Twice as big as the regular-sized marbles, one of the bummies was a powerful, shiny, steel ball that stood out magnificently from all the rest.  This was The Warrior.  The boy's second bummie choice had been his great, yellow and green, cat-eye.  Though merely glass, the cat-eye was alive with the watchful menace of a distant but very present, jungle predator.  It had a couple of small chinks in its smooth, crystal surface, but the boy felt proud of it anyway.  His Giant Tiger was well known, by most, to be one of the prettiest prizes in his neighborhood.
      Out of the boy's full treasure of about 40 marbles, the third of the favorites he had brought along with him was a diminutive, chocolate, pinwheel that lay frozen in time at the center of a crystal orb—small, warm, petrified excellence.  Fourth and final, he selected The Ice Maiden.  Sweet, creamy, white snowball of perfect purity.  She held the secret power to give a boy the magical protection of invisibility in time of danger.  He was eight years old, and it was playtime.
      The boy owned other playthings that might have entertained him.  He still had most of his alphabet blocks; he had his Davey-Crockett-coonskin-cap; and he had the broken Daniel Boone flintlock rifle that he had found in the trash behind Sears & Roebuck during one of his Saturday sojourns beyond home.  He had lots of little, green, plastic soldiers too. None of them could stand up on their own.  He was also allowed to play with anything else around the house upon which his “Mama” had pronounced the final condemnation of “no good.”  Nevertheless, for this day, and this time, he was absorbed in his fascination with the worlds that beckoned to him from the depths of his marbles. 
      What the boy loved best was to be outdoors, in the wide-open spaces, underneath the great dome of the sky; but on this particular day, he had been restricted to the indoors again.  When he was outside, he loved to get lost in the winds that blew the sunshine through the leaves of the chinaberry trees, up into his nostrils, across his dusty, brown shoulders, and around to his bare back.  This was the baptism that his heart knew and understood.  Outdoors, there would be another wonder and adventure to be had around every corner. Every rock was hiding a new mystery in the dark crevice that lay beneath it. .  Wondrous revelations were to be got at each progressively higher branch of every tree, and there was something exciting to be found in the murky water of every mud hole.  Still, on this day, he and his four favoritest marbles would have to confine their play to the small space beneath the square of the old dinette-table that rocked against the wall of their cramped kitchen.  He had to do his best to keep from “underfoot” while the grown-ups went about their business.
      His Daddy, “Pop”, as everybody called him, was enthroned in his special chair in the next room, the “middle-room” of their small three-room apartment.  It was a happy-happy day for Daddy.  He was enjoying an afternoon of long, slow, southern camaraderie with Cutty Sark and a few friends.  Meanwhile, the boy’s Mama, the one who had sentenced him to this day of house detention, was rattling about in the kitchen. She moved from the stove to the sink, from the sink to the icebox, from the icebox to the table, and back around again.  Now and then, she would detour into the middle-room with Daddy and friends.  Soon, she would be happy-happy too. The boy kept himself quietly hidden from view, beneath the table, and behind the hood of the low-hanging tablecloth.  From his obscured post, he easily kept track of his Mama’s slippered feet and the sway of her colorful skirt sweeping against the mid-point of her legs each time she limped past the table.
      As soon as the boy was released to the outside, he would run and run until he was out of breath.  Having run to his limit, he would stop to rest, still standing—nostrils flaring.  Sweating and heaving in sublime exhaustion, he would just hang his weight upon his own knees by his elbows rather than flop to the ground like the other boys.  With every heave and gasp for air, he could feel himself filling up with greater impatience to start all over again—just one more race, or two…or three…before the street lights came on….
      The “Street Light” rule was one of the main links in the chain that grown-ups used to tether him to the inside—the “Change Your School Clothes Before You Go Out to Play” rule, the “Don’t Leave the Yard” rule, the “Come Right Back from Errands” rule, and the “Don’t Steal the Change from Mama’s Bureau Drawer” rule were a few more.  There were so many rules that the boy never could quite keep up with them all.  As a result, he regularly found himself spending day after day restricted from the outdoors that he loved so much.  Keeping him from the outdoors was the next-to-the-most-severe punishment the boy feared. The punishments he dreaded most were the back-blistering whippings Mama dished out with her extension cord.  There were just too many rules, and he had broken every one of them a hundred times.
      His Mama and Daddy fed the boy, clothed him, and even regaled him with amusing stories about their younger days.  But they couldn’t get down on their bare knees and shoot marbles with him in the black dirt though.  They couldn’t crawl underneath the house with him and race the doodle-bugs that were there to be scooped up out of the sand if you called out to them three times, really fast. And they couldn’t run barefoot, laughing and shirtless in the sun to catch minnows and crawfish in the cool mud, amongst the pop-gun reeds that grew along McKoy Creek.  As much as they might have wanted to, they could not produce a little brother or sister for him to play with either.
 Mama and Daddy were old and arthritic, unexciting and unattractive.  He loved them both, but in the secret place of his heart he wanted young, exciting parents who would give him brothers and sisters and take him places like the rest of the kids were able to go to.  He wanted a family that he wouldn’t be embarrassed to bring friends home to.
      Now, you are not thinking that this boy actually thought all of these things out, are you?  Of course not! He was much too young to have articulated such things, but he felt them—every single one and more.
While his Mama and Daddy desired to have him safe and sound at home with them, he just wanted the joys of boyhood that were waiting, screaming gleefully, outside the windows for him…. 
      The boy’s Mama knew from experience that any deterrent effect of “detention” would not last long.  She knew that the boy's reaction to detention would be to relentlessly seek out any possible means of escape from that house, so she kept him under close watch.  Still, he sneaked out of the backdoor—or the front door--or creeped through and open window at the first chance he got..   If the window screen had been nailed shut, he simply tore right through it with whatever instrument was handy. If she made the mistake of sending him on an errand of any sort, no matter how stern the warning to go directly there and return straight away, he detoured nonetheless. Making his own itinerary, he returned home only under the cover of night, under the motheaten mantle of another incoherent prayer, babbled through streaming snot and tears.
      Sometime during the night before, from " out of the blue," Albert had stumbled into their house.  At an hour long after the boy and his Mama and Daddy were quietly in their beds, the man had come...