I sometimes dwell on the summers of my childhood. I think of the high fence that surrounded my junior school as I walked to my best friend’s house. I had left this school years before, but each time I connected the journey with smell of Play-Doh, that vegetable-based modelling clay with its distinctive smell.
Memory is like this; one thing connects to another in ways that defy analysis.
One more example would be the rope swing, and how it always irrevocably connects to a man I sometimes see in the city. He knows me, and I really don’t know him, but the rope swing reminds me of him and it’s only the tales my friends tell that brings any illumination to the mystery of it all.
Either side of my childhood stomping grounds were two hills. One that overlooked the school I sometimes walked past on my way to my friends, and the other overlooking a busy road that led into the city centre. Both these places were our playgrounds, filled with half dug hideouts and rope swings. But the strength of the one was the weakness of the other.
The rope swing that hung from the tall tree that overlooked the school could not be beat. The tree stood at the crest of a sandy slope that was not an easy climb. If you slipped, you would tumble to the bottom of the slope and would have a long trek back to the top in a winding path that would take the better part of an hour. The tree was tall, and the rope was long, and when you swung out over the slope birds would look up at you in envy.
On the hill beside the road – the other side of my neighbourhood – nature had packed dense foliage. The trees stood like sentries in tight rows, even the steep slope that led directly to the edge of the road were tight with them. This made the hill a place with more hidden places than seen ones. This was where you went if you wanted to hunt your friends in a game of Empire and Rebel – my generations variation on Cowboys and Indians – or where you built a fort or dug a pit. The sky was a memory here, the earth damp and thick underfoot.
Each place had its speciality.
A bit like people.
If the skies drew you then the rope swing was your destination of choice, but if hidden things were your passion then the hill beside the road was your destination.
Despite my fear of heights, or perhaps because of it, I found myself drawn to the swing and the ethereal fear that it would spark within me. Fear may have been too slight a word; the emotion was too great for such a word. The feeling was that of terror, of an acute awareness that life was brief and our grasp on it was weak. As the ground withdrew and the air became cold even on the warmest of days, I would reach the apex of my climb and gravity would fall away for a moment. In those moments I thought I could feel death himself smile.
The danger was a genuine one, as I one day found when on an outward swing the thirty feet of weather beaten, rotten, two-inch rope snapped.
There were three of us on the rope at the time, Mark, Deane, and myself, and being the heaviest I flew the farthest. It all happened in a fragment of an instant, a shard of a moment. Before I knew the danger, it was over and all that remained was the pain and the near certainty that a rib had broken free. Each breath stabbed pain. It encouraged an exclamation of pain while robbing me of the ability to express it.
I pushed up to my knees and stared into the slope of sand beneath me, listening to the groans of pain from my injured fiends.
This was close to the last week of summer, and I remember the following few days being quiet. None of us left our homes and settled into pass times that would allow ourselves to mend without drawing attention to the injuries. I read, and drew, and watched endless movies as the pain slowly subsided. After a day I decided that my ribs were probably intact as my breathing eased, but a large bruise sat across my ample belly up to my collar bone, so I knew it had been a close call.
A week later the horror that was school began again, and it was then that I heard the news.
Ours was not the only accident that summer.
The rope swing that hung from the tall tree that overlooked the school remained broken until the following year, when someone – presumably someone far braver than any of us – had climbed the tree and replaced the decayed rope.
The hill beside the road, the one with packed in tight foliage became overgrown with disuse.
A boy my own age, someone I knew – but did not know well – had had an accident over the summer, taking a tumble not unlike our own. But while I had landed on packed sand he had landed on hard tarmac, inches in front of a speeding vehicle.
We did not see the boy in school after that, when he finally returned to full time education he did at a different school, one more specialised to his new needs.
I sometimes see this boy, now a man, as I walk through the city centre. I live there, the shops have replaced the green stomping grounds of my youth, so I see him often. He always greets me as an old friend, even though I barely know him. He remembers me and I have learned that this is because the damage the accident did to his brain has caused a kind of complete recall of his youth.
My own memory is not so good, I barely remember any of it, so I sometimes think that he knows the old me better than I do myself.
I take comfort from this.
You see, he remembers me with affection, so the bad-tempered boy I remember being may not have been that bad at all.
When I think of the summer, I also think of him, when I remember the rope swing and I cannot help but feel the joy of freedom tainted with the knowledge of my own mortality. But mostly I remember the man who knew me as a boy, and I remember that I do not remember the boy he must have been. I know our memories of our shared childhood do not match but believe that his is probably more correct than my own. The accident took something from him, but it gave him something too.
His smile is one of absolute joy when he sees me, and our talks are of the bright moments of our youthly adventures. I do not remember these adventures, and perhaps they never existed at all, but he has a good heart and he remembers them to be true. So, when my heart sometimes hurts when I see him, I wonder whether it hurts for the man he might have been, or if it hurts for the boy he remembers. I wonder if – on that day – he had visited the rope swing instead of me, and I had instead met his fate next to the road, which of us would have lost the most?
So, when life tempts me to mourn the loss of those bright summers of my childhood, I remember that there are those to which these days never end. There are people who hold the same youthful joy in their hearts even as they move from the summer of their lives into the winter. They know that the winter sun glinting off unbroken show is just as beautiful as the summers of their youth, and that thought make me smile.