Balance

Everyone knows about the middle ear and how there is something there that checks on your balance and helps you know if you about to fall, but few know there is something at the center of our brains which checks ever few seconds on your mental equilibrium and reports to the rest of the mush that your universe is in order, that it is in balance. That little something is always on edge.

Okay, you have to know about the trucks. You have to know because I consider one of my worst, and one of my best, times. Where to start? Oh! At the beginning.

I got the trucks when I was five. There was an orange steam shovel, a long green bottom loader with big wheels and a yellow grader. Down the hill from the Valley Street baseball diamond was a section in the woods where the State of Connecticut had dumped about fifty tons of sand for no good reason, it just luckily made a giant sandbox surrounded by birch trees. The bunch of us neighborhood kids played in that sandpit for days on end. Everyone had trucks, but my trucks were the best, there was nothing like them in the world. They were heavy and had big wheels and were just the right colors. It was such fun. We made roads and holes, lots of them and then the rain would wipe everything away and we would do it again. Our mothers had to walk all the way across the ballfield to call us for supper, if they hadn't I think we would have played until pitch dark.

Then I turned seven and discovered the wonderful smell of baseball glove leather and the pleasure of hitting an outside pitch.

Fast forward
I am now 22 and listening to my sister-in-law telling the story of how Wayne, her dad, had given her older brother a train set one Christmas, but then decided that it was too good for him to play with and put it up in the closet. From then on it was taken out only at Christmas and only Wayne got to run it. It was sillier than how mean that sounds, but I told myself I would never do that to my kids.

Fast Forward
There is a new baby and Mom and Pop have driven out to Oklahoma and with them they have brought the box of my stuff that Mom had kept through the years. There is my stamp collection, record albums, three Hardy Boys books, my marbles, some copies of Sing Out that I thought I had left in Boston, papers from high school, poems from sixth grade and, holy cow, my trucks.

I was so happy to see them. The yellow grader's blade was bent and the treads of the steam shovel were gone, but the green loader looked great and the doors at the bottom swung open nicely.

I was busy with so many things then, the baby's frailness, the unhappiness of the baby's mother, the other little kiddo, trying to find the money for school, the little place in my brain looking for balance, I put the box up in the attic.

Fast forward
After the divorce, the second one, another story, I am packing my stuff to take to the apartment, I find the box and the kiddo, who is now eleven, -yeah, well I forgot about it,right?--when I tell him he can have the trucks to play with. He loves them like I did!! In a stroke of genius he uses two black book bands for steam shovel treads. He builds Lego walls and rolls those trucks around on the carpet in the living room and has a grand time.

Two years later
Kiddo rides up to the apartment on a very nice red bicycle. In Tulsa then, as I am sure now, there are Swap Meets. You bring stuff to trade. If I can get you to take my crap for some of your crap that I believe is better, everyone is happy.

"Wow! Nice bike. Where'd you get it?"
"I traded those old trucks for it. Cool, huh? Can we paint it with pinstripes?"

I am thunderstruck.
I am dumbfounded.

"I was thinking maybe black ones or yellow"

I am incoherently croaking out a question about the whereabouts of the swap meet. I am flying down the street to the corner, I am flying across the ballfield to the sand pit, I am trying not to panic the part of the brain which checks every few minutes on the balance of the universe, I am making roads and holes and above us the birch trees are waving and whispering.

They are long gone. The last few tables at the swap meet hold only stuff that no one wants, even the people who brought it.

I am stomach punched.

I cry all the way back to the apartment. I have to stop once just to remind myself of Wayne and the train and just how silly, how crazy, these feeling are.

Fast forward a week or so.
It took most of an afternoon and evening, but we took the bike's wheels off and then carefully made spirals of tape down along it's top tube and bands around the chainstays and front and back tubes. We did yellow and black. There was nothing like it in the world and the little place in my brain relaxed.

Then it started checking again. It always does that.