About Time by Robert Nichols

Author:Robert Nichols [Robert Nichols]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2015-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Monkey Bar Children

Several years ago, as one who has stayed much of the course of the cyclical patterns that have been the decades of Carol Riehl, I was blessed by experiencing the clarity of a thirty-year arcing of emotion: an instantaneous connection, a synapse creating a oneness of love transcending the erosion of time.

Carol and I, upon a sentimental excursion into the scenes of our childhood, were visiting the very playground of Lockwood Elementary School where first we had met. And there we were, Carol and Robert, on the cusp of our forties: adults, career professionals, parents. And instantly we became again the children of that dawning of our epoch. I gripped the rungs of the horizontal ladder and realized it was much less terrifying to make the arm-to-arm-to-arm grasps now that I was tall enough that my feet could reach the ground. And Carol, ever the sport, in a gravity-defying lunge, leaped to the high bar, kicked her feet between her arms, and in a graceful arc flopped her legs over and hung upside down.

I was so struck by the moment that I could do no more than gawk in muted amazement. How, in those awkward days of being a strange kid from out in the county, rudely transplanted to the mob of an urban institution, I had come to find comfort in the giggling realm of the monkey bars. And there she was, every bit as alluring in the twilight of her thirties as she had been the first time I gazed upon her lithe form spinning round and round the bar. Time ceased to exist: I was a boy, I was man; she was girl, she was a woman. And I thought to myself, "Gee, too bad she’s not wearing a dress." And from her face, which in mere seconds had lost its wholesome glow and become a blotchy pink, grimacing mass, she gasped in a gurgling whisper, "Help me, Robert. Help me."

Awestruck by the cosmic coincidence of form superimposed upon form, time’s dominion over the continuum of existence diminished to insignificance, the immortality of love… I didn’t immediately react to her plea.

"Charlie horses… my God… both legs… Charlie horses," she was saying.

"I don’t suppose you could spin around, could you?" I asked.

By then her complexion had taken on a frightful reddish cast. Little Carol Riehl, third-grade acrobat; Dr. Carol Nichols, first-rate college professor–how I loved them both.

And then her upside-down lips (it was hard for me to tell if she was smiling or frowning) formed the words, "Damn it, Robert! Get me down."

I embraced her and gently lowered her from the bar, gingerly placing her on the ground where she lay for some time, confident that for the rest of her pain-racked years her body would remain in the shape of a giant "L."

"If ever I am so lucky as to walk upright again, I swear I’ll never go near another monkey bar," she said.

And I knew that for all time, there would be no need for her to go near another monkey bar.

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