Scenes from Childhood: The Merry-go-round

It's the biggest chunk of time in my memory, those hours I spent on my merry-go-round. We lived across the street from the elementary school playground, and when school was over the playground belonged to the neighborhood. So picture this: one little girl. Was I 7? Or 9? 10? 12? All of those. Add one large, empty school playground. It couldn't have been always empty, of course, but in my mind I see it empty. Except for me.

There were actually two merry-go-rounds on that playground. One was ordinary: red, low, and designed to spin fast, faster, fastest. But it didn't interest me.

My merry-go-round was the other one. It sat in the corner of the playground nearest our house. It was hexagonal, made of wood and iron, and the planks that formed the seat were high off the ground, so that if you lay on your back and trailed a foot, that foot only barely reached the asphalt surface of the playground.

This merry-go-round was a pumper. I don't know that I've ever seen another like it. It had three pumping stations. You sat with your feet on the bottom bar of the pump, hands clutching the top bar. Then you put your whole body into making that heavy, clunky merry-go-round go around. First giving it a shove with your foot was easier than trying to pump it from a dead stop. Its inertia was hard to overcome. And of course it was even easier to pump up to speed if you had someone working at each of the pumps—three kids in all.

But all of this is beside the point. Here's the point of that merry-go-round. The iron works, the axle (what do you call a vertical axle?), was never oiled. And both the iron and the wood were effective transmitters of sound. You lay on your stomach on the wooden seat, your length perfectly fitting along one of the six boards that formed the hexagon. One ear rested on the wood. Then you reached down with your foot and gave enough of a shove to start the merry-go-round moving. And then you heard the music of the spheres.

Your ear caught those groaning tones as the merry-go-round moved. No, it didn't just "catch" those tones. By lying there, ear down, you were able to become the sounds themselves. Those universal tones were like the winds of the solar system deeply twanging the wires that hold each planet in the sky, each star in its Milky Way spot. The tones were both low and high and were always different from the time before. The sound penetrated whoever lay with ear against the wood. Who was always just me.

Did I really spend hours doing that? I think so. No one missed me at home, and if they had called me I could have heard them from across the street. But they didn't, and I stayed, belly down, ear against the thick oak plank, listening to the universe.

You know how people start making "life lists" of things they want to do before they die? Like "see Rio," or "see the Northern Lights," or "travel alone through India" or "take a hallucinogenic drug." I find it hard to make lists like that, because my nature seems to be to accept what is rather than to create wants. But this is my exception: before I die, I want to find a merry-go-round like that one: hexagonal, wood and iron, with three pumper stations. And I want to lie on it, ear to the board, and give it a little shove with one long leg reaching to the ground. And I will lie there, listening, until I die.

Tell me if you know of one.

Copyright 2007 Ann Tudor
www.anntudor.ca