The Foundation

When does youth end? When do we pass through the magical gate and leave childhood behind for good? Is it when we leave the nest, get a job, get a dog, marry our high school sweetheart and lock in for 20years at prime. I don’t know, or at least I didn’t know.

When I was a kid my parents bought me a swing set for the back yard. I can’t remember the day that it arrived in a box from Sears, I must have been 5 years old. I can't remember helping my dad put it up in the back yard. I helped mix the cement that would anchor the legs, stirring the 5 gallon pale of grey slop. Dad dug the holes and I helped to pour the concrete in once the set was erected and ready to become a permanent part of the back lawn.

That swing set became a part of my existence. It was the sure sign of spring when I would rescue the swings from the shed and attach them back onto the crossbar. For the next few months I was swinging. Pumping my legs I’d climb higher and higher yet. I’d boast to my friends that one day I’d ride it all the way around – like my dad did when he was a boy – or at least I assumed he had. With the kids from down the street we’d alternate pendulum swings and the spun steel would creak and groan under the weight. Never once did it bend or break – the foundation was deep and strong.

As I grew older I didn’t stop swinging. It sounds odd articulating it now, but sometime around ten I discovered the joy of thinking. I would escape into my own thoughts and daydream for hours at a stretch. With my first generation Sony Sports Walkman clipped to the belt of my shorts I’d swing for what seemed like the entire day listening to the Beach Boys, The Beatles and whatever was on AM106 at the time. My mind would drift to all corners of the globe and I’d be lost amongst the cathartic kinaesthetic rhythm, metronoming back and forth, grinding a groove in the sky.

As I grew the swings stayed longer and longer in the shed after the snow faded until one year when they never made it onto the set at all. One year stretched to two and before long the swings were lost amongst the clutter behind the lawn mower and my first two-wheeler. Still as strong as the day it went into the ground the swingset stood like a stoic reminder of days gone by. It became a part of the back yard a sort of art installation that outsiders never really understood. When I moved away from home I strolled through the house and said a quiet goodbye to my life at 136 Bracewood – but the swing never entered my mind.

Ten years pass in a blink of an eye and that swing set still hasn’t moved an inch. I now stay in my old room as a guest and share a glass of vino with my folks and discuss married life – everything has evolved. The swings have long since been thrown out and the idea of a smaller house for retirement comes up over dinner more then once. I make the suggestion without really considering the memorial implications of the act I offer to do.

It’s a hot day, not a cloud in the sky, my sports walkman in now an iPod with every album I’ve ever owned loaded onto it. I dial up The Who and Roger’s voice belts in my ear, “I hope I die before I get old…” with a twinge of sadness I start to dig. The footing was deep, deeper then I thought it would be, this swing set was built to last. I clear off the cement and do the same for the other three anchor points. It feels like I’m felling an old growth rainforest when the saw fires up and I cut through the first steel post. One down, three to go. In the space of 30minutes the swing set is no more.

Twisted and sad I clear up the rubbish and replace the sod. The slate’s been wiped clean, like it was never there. For 26 years it stood there and now it’s gone, gone forever.

It’s been said that on the path to enlightenment the student must at some point kill the teacher. So what does it mean when the child has to cut down his own swing set? Some may say that there is little behind this concept other then yard maintenance and doing something for the folks before they sell up and move onto new horizons. But as that last post fell and the final remnants of my youth were erased from the landscape of my childhood home I knew that there was something more to the process.

So when do we become adults? I don’t know. I can’t tell you a defining moment that is the turning point from one stage of life to the next. Like winter turning to spring, the change is so gradual, pinpointing a day is near on impossible. It isn’t until you remember building the snowman that you realize that spring has come.

Though the swing set is gone now and the family home isn’t far behind, the foundation that we set into the ground will remain forever. Just under the surface, too big to be removed, like a rock to which my youth was anchored. A foundation that I built the rest of my life upon. Swinging high, higher then I thought I could. Dreaming of far away lands, lost in thought, cutting an arc in the sky, wind in my hair. I close my eyes and I’m right back, right here, a million miles away and in the same place all at the same time. The swing set is gone – but I’ll never stop swinging.

SK