Time Travel
I’m standing on a patch of spring grass in the park with the sun on my back, pushing my 10 month old grandson Bryce in a swing. Little children are running around. Bryce giggles and kicks. Swinging high, he makes a funny face, has to catch his breath in the wind.
I’m swinging my grandson in the park. I say it out loud, waking myself to an alignment where my future is revealed as the present and I’m calling back to the past.
I’m swinging my grandson in the park. I don’t know how it happened, a beach town girl from Massachusetts, living in the country in Virginia, swinging her first grandchild in a park.
“Look. I’m swinging my grandson in the park," I say and everyone listens; the tiny girl who missed her daddy when he was stationed in the Quadraline Islands in 1952; the four year old girl in the wool snowsuit whose baby carriage was left empty when she lost her favorite doll; 
the girl in the pink flip flops eating cotton candy at Paragon Park (We spent all our money and had to walk the 5 miles home and my flip flop kept coming apart.); the girl in the plaid clam diggers posing with her big family at a cook-out down on the Cape; the young woman who danced every weekend at The Surf Ballroom, liked boys, and went to four proms; the South Shore day care teacher who pushed little four year olds in swings, read them stories, and made play-dough pies; the woman who bore her own two precious boys and loved every moment of raising them; the jewelry maker who bought her own home with money earned vending Grateful Dead concerts; the one who married the love of her life on the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1997; the writer who writes her life down.
So this is it. Here I am now. I’m swinging my grandson in the park.
Post note: I think the squeaky swing hypnotized me for this time trip. Video clip "The Next Best Thing to Flying" of Bryce's reactions to swinging is HERE.
Comments
"There goes the time" indeed.
Posted by: chris | March 21, 2009 5:31 PM
Hi Colleen - here from Tanya's this weekend...
I loved that video of Bryce on the swing - it's true, the little man is flying! :-)
I find I reminisce around children too...
cq
Posted by: craziequeen | March 21, 2009 5:50 PM
The joy and excitement of swinging. I can remember that, but remember it so much better when my little grandchildren are doing it again.
Posted by: Tabor | March 21, 2009 6:59 PM
I have often wondered about and marveled at the progression of my life, too, and hasn't it all come and gone too fast?
Posted by: kenju | March 21, 2009 7:00 PM
I remember pushing Nyssa in those swings when she was just a little girl... long ago, way before we moved the swing set from Oklahoma to Mississippi and long before the straight winds came and blew the oak tree over and on to the swing set, smashing it flat... much to Nyssa's delight. (She was a freshman in high school and it was by then an embarrassment to her fragile teenage psyche.)
Time flies!
Posted by: srp | March 21, 2009 7:14 PM
Beautifully written. The clear images of the stages of your life, "swinging" back to the almost-surprised awareness of the present, has a musical, almost hypnotic, quality. The poignancy of this piece easily brought me to the bittersweet passage of my own life and the telescoping of my many selves. I think good music, art and writing has this character of simple clarity, of personal revelation, yet somehow with the self held humbly aside, to invite the viewer, the reader in, to experience their own truth or beauty.
Posted by: Bruce | March 22, 2009 7:19 AM
i can sense a proud grandmother here. :)
Posted by: kikit | March 22, 2009 8:11 AM
Well said, Bruce. I think that is indeed the job of writing, to resonate and move others in such a way that allows them to "experience their own truth and beauty."
Posted by: colleen | March 22, 2009 8:57 AM
Lovely writing, lovely life, and lovely grandson. :-)
Posted by: Beth | March 22, 2009 12:04 PM
It does seem like time flies the older we grow, doesn't it? You turn around and it's like a film clip.
Excellent visuals in this piece of work. Well done.
Posted by: CountryDew | March 22, 2009 12:11 PM
I could envision your life as I read your words ... wonderful post...
BTW, just finished both of the books - The Jim and Dan Stories and Muses Like Moonlight...they were wonderful and this was the right time to read them...Thanks...
Posted by: Sara | March 22, 2009 4:38 PM
wonderful post
thanks
last call over at Netchicks
Posted by: david - living in the tree house | March 23, 2009 2:34 AM
This post got to me.
I haven't really stopped crying long enough to write this. xo
Posted by: Sherry | March 23, 2009 8:05 AM
Like I bawled when Heather was born and I lived in Texas?
Posted by: colleen | March 23, 2009 8:28 AM
I think this is a sweet post. Sometimes I will just plop down in the middle of the yard and think "This is it. The best days of my life. Who would've thought after all the mistakes I made that I could be so happy, so blessed, so in love."
Posted by: Deana | March 23, 2009 10:11 AM
profound for sure for all of us Sandy almost a year already sigh
Posted by: sandy | March 23, 2009 11:05 AM
Your writing and life's philosophy resonate so closely to my own, Colleen. This entry reached deep into my soul, as I often stop and wonder how I got here, too. Your words speak powerfully about life's ability to follow its own path despite our often-heroic attempts to point it where we want it to go.
Sometimes, we just hold on and end up wherever we end up. I often have similar thoughts when I wake up hundreds of miles away from where I grew up and think about the twists and turns that helped me get to this particular time and place.
I feel so blessed to be on the journey. Thank you for this important reminder.
Dropped by from Tanya's tonight. Good to e-see you again!
Posted by: Carmi | March 29, 2009 9:13 PM
Carmi, I always feel privileged to receive your comments.
Posted by: colleen | March 29, 2009 9:18 PM