I Can See! Nope, I Was Wrong
For the past five days, I have been going crazy trying to figure out which activities don’t require the use of my eyes. Friday night I lost my last pair of contacts (I needed to go see the optometrist anyway) and I have been stuck wearing my glasses since. Now, I love my glasses, I do, but either the prescription is outdated or the mild corneal damage on my right is screwing things up—regardless, wearing them for extended periods of time gives me a headache. Because of the slight damage to my right eye, I cannot get a new contacts prescription until Saturday, therefore I am stuck in limbo for the next few days. (Still waffling between Jade Green or Warm Honey for colours when I finally get contacts.)
Being blind rules out most things for me: TV, internet, writing/revising, drawing, piano, but worst of all, it rules out reading. The Loveseat and I were discussing the other day that we read so much, it’s often to the detriment of our other activities. I’ve read while walking to and from the subway station. Heaven forbid I’ve finished the book I have while on the subway—I’ll read the backs of everyone else’s AM New York or the terrible, terrible ads for David Baldacci and Hennessey’s. I’ve tried to read in the shower. On a number of occasions. (It never works. I know it never works. Still, it doesn’t stop me from trying.) I read while “cooking.” (If popping things in the microwave constitutes cooking.) I read when I eat. (Bad habit, so I am told.) If I have nothing to read at the breakfast table, I’ll resort to reading the nutrition panel on the sides of cereal boxes. This act of reading things so defines my daily life that not being able to do it is completely and utterly throwing off my sense of equilibrium.
What did I even do before internet/reading so insidiously took over my life? I mean, I was always a four-eyed nerd (I’ve had glasses since the tender young age of seven), but it didn’t mean I didn’t go out and play either. When did I forget how to play?
Today I decided I was going to have recess. Three 10 minute intervals throughout the day where I’d just go outside and enjoy the sunshine (thankfully this week promises to be bee-yoo-ti-ful). I packed up White-Harp in my little red backpack-purse and walked to a nearby park where I knew was a swingset and decided to re-live being young and carefree and playful.
The swings were always my favourite thing on the playground. I lived in apartments for the earliest parts of my childhood and while I didn’t have a backyard until I was 9 years old, I always lived within walking distance of parks. Because my parents worked full time, my grandmother spent most of her days minding me, although I needed little enough of that. I was usually left to my own devices, but every day I would badger her into letting me rollerblade or ride my bike in the back alleyway by our apartment complex. Sometimes, when she was feeling especially generous (or she had run out of Korean dramas to watch), she’d take me to Crescenta Valley Park to go play on the swings.
There’s an unnamed park near my apartment here in Astoria with handball/squash courts, basketball hoops, a fountain with a dragon in the middle, a child’s playground, and a swingset. I walk by it everyday on my way into Manhattan, but I never see anyone using the swings. I decided to remedy that and, with White-Harp on my back, climbed onto the set and began pumping my legs.
I was always proud of the fact that I never needed anyone to push me, but never turned it down whenever my mum or dad offered. It was the best when Mum did it; she would grasp the swing and run underneath me. It never failed to make me laugh to see her dark hair emerged from beneath my outstretched legs. Crescenta Valley was the closest park and it was where my grandmother took me, but Dunsmore was further and better, because that was where my mother and father would bring me (in their car!) on the offchance they were home before twilight. Mum would push me, even though she knew perfectly well that I could push myself, and afterward Dad would lift me and sit me on his shoulders where I could touch the sky.
The swingset in the park by my apartment is set over rubber. That’s really weird to me; all the swings I’ve ever been on back in California were either set over woodchips or sand. Rubber doesn’t develop that trough beneath each swing, doesn’t give the same way, doesn’t turn a darker colour when you kick it early in the morning, when the ground is still damp with dew. Regardless, I sat down in one and took off my glasses, and began pumping away.
It didn’t take long to get into the rhythm of it. I could have been 12 years old again and in 7th grade, swinging with my friends during recess, gossiping over whether one of the boys in our class was dating an older woman in 8th grade, calling ourselves “married” whenever our swings fell in tandem, jumping off at the height of an arc, playing “chicken” by lying on our backs in the seat and then doing a backflip off while in motion. It was me, Woofie, Pam, Carrie, Mandi, Lai, and Shawn then. Sometimes Shari when she wasn’t playing basketball. There were the monkey bars next to the set too that the boys would sometimes come over and climb: Brian, Austen, Bryce, and Shannon. Maybe they’d play handball in the court in front of us. I never had a crush on Austen, but I remember thinking he was cute, with ginger hair and freckles on his face. He moved away to Utah the next year. Our breaks were only 10 minutes, but they were long enough to talk about whether or not Cassie cheated on Bryce with someone else, who would look cute with who if they were dating, invitations to Andrew’s 13th birthday party where it was rumoured his father built him an entire half-pipe and bought him a trampoline. (Both, it turned out, were true.)
I only played on the swings for 15 minutes before the reality of age got to me. It wasn’t that anyone gave me strange looks—it was just me and White-Harp and a father and his toddler son in the park. But the difference between 12 year old me and 23 year old me is apparently a question of constitution. I don’t recall slight nausea being part of swinging when I was a child, but apparently it comes part and parcel with maturity. Say it ain’t so! The saddest day of my life was when I realised boardwalk rides made me sick when my favourite thing when I was nine years old was to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl with Kristine Young over and over. The day I find that rollercoasters make me sick, I’ll just throw in the towel and set myself up in a retirement home.
