Worlds in a Sandbox and a Street

I want to remember a time in life when I was an integral part of the world: when a child at play--indeed in the proverbial sandbox in our backyard in Sacramento. My young friends, brother Jonn, and I built elegantly planned roads of curves and turnouts, underground car ports, sad dwellings of found materials for our Matchbox vehicles and imaginary citizens. At play was not a diversion but the creative point of living a long afternoon. Bridges spanned hand-dug rivers into which poured water from sticky green garden hose. Intricate care was taken to smooth the roads and distance the dwellings. None of us in the south Sacramento neighborhood possessed miniature railroad gear to pilfer from--trees, depots, people--to make our town more colorful and "realistic" -- What did we bother with realism? There was no interest in "recreating" what a miniature town should resemble. We recreated nothing. We carved and patted and smoothed sanded roads, dug and fortified dwellings for small toy vehicles; the narrow roads were real as were the tiny gasless cars and pickups our imagination fired and wheeled not to develop imaginary worlds but to create and build in the real one: our town had no center, no economy, no police force, no rest home, no library, no adults, no animals, no arrogant, no lonely. We had narrow winding roads engineered for toy cars to smoothly glide from their stick-covered shelters to nowhere. But the roads were smooth! They curved elegantly. As night came on we worried over the coming storm we overheard the weather man on TV news warn about when we drifted by the living room to the bathroom to pee. Night falling, wind rising, we tucked our vehicles inside their dwellings and sheltered with makeshift garage doors. We didn't want to leave our sand and water world, return to warmth of lights and family and television and our place-mats at the dinner table. We relished darkening and threateningly cooler winds, iron in the air, desired not the ordered stage but to watch over our sand and water dominion out back by the puffy white Viburnum opulus (Snowball bush)... -- The internet kills play. Play is unprogrammed, unrehearsed, open-ended, relatively untimed, and so timeless, bounded only by the borders of the twin tyrannies of sleep and school. It is a testament of the purity of play that I remember few details of how we passed the time of childhood. Ditch Em, the game, would have recurred. This activity consisted of breaking into two or three "teams" of around three boys each--whomever we could scour from the neighborhood that particular afternoon after the game popped into somebody's head while lounging on the porch. Our teams had no uniforms, no names, no hierarchy. Brothers were never allies. Ditch Em--did we create this name or inherit it from ancestors?--began when someone unpicked and random yelled "Ditch Em!" and we bolted with our tribe in opposing directions. Could be running down a long block, catapulting over the chain-link fence of our elementary school, hoisting up onto the wooden-planked backyard fence (didn't matter whose backyard), heaving into the silver maple, dropping onto the back lawn and crossing quickly, then up and over a neighboring fence (didn't matter whose fence). All backyards had hideouts: honeysuckle and pussywillow, hemmed-in weedy empty dog pens, burrowing under citrus metallic-tanged shade of sturdy thronging juniper bushes, the dusty oil dark cool of garages. The motive and mission of the game: to see and remain unseen, to scout and monitor enemy positions, their stealth movements. The endgame was to gain the controlling eye, to adjust your movements, retreats, advances, and escapes according to your enemies'. To know and be unknown was the point and only power. Usually a few blocks radius whirling out from the corners of Vernace Way and 48th avenue encompassed the boundaries. With bikes, it could be miles and miles, and then knowledge of enemy movements shone like diamonds in your mind. You traveled and hid, spied and ducked, burrowed and waited and listened. If your team was spotted, you made fast and furious escape; for although there was an initial and formative spurt of chase by the enemy when they surprised, no capture ensued. There was only the advantage of knowing. Pursuers and pursued would slink and sneak again into hiding, create and maintain strategies of concealment and witness. Summer rolled on.

While the Girls are Off Shopping...

"...wondering who the f*** is on mad McCarthy's porch..." is a snippet from Jack Kerouac's vast grand beatific wild experimental novel Visions of Cody penned in 1951-2 but its glory remained unpublished until 1973, and it's just Ti Jean gazing, examining, watching, peering, wondering, contemplating, running, driving, drinking, thinking, and penning, and I picture him slumped in a porch chair in October: cool, dry, long afternoon slanting light across pale warped wooden planks and just brushing a peeling weathered railing pushed against the azalea thicket. Mrs Smith is carting home groceries in a wheeling squeaky black wire basket, Tide and cornflakes box bumping along behind her, she chewing gossip fed her by Mrs Peterson around the block beneath a sycamore regarding minister Ralph and the new choir director Miss Angel behind the eyes of the sanctuary, and here she spies Kerouac slumped leaning back in frayed wicker porch chair, his pen in hand poised in delicate thin air, paused in fury like a hummingbird hovering inches from the spiral writing pad, pausing to glance from cool shadows into which he'd retreated to record in hermitage silence--broken only by the spooked untamed horses of his mind--a flooding memory of nights and nights ago a nonstop dialogue with poet Allen Ginsberg, the two unkempt and hungry almost running talking at the same time finishing each other's thoughts and beginning each other's sentences, interrupting dreams, beaten leather dark brown shoes flapping and skidding across the rising sidewalks of upper Columbus, sniffing the spicy brine of a San Francisco August, the drifting Bay, yeasty bread, coffee grounds, oregano, honeysuckle, lavender, pine, the two men wild-eyed, grimacing, laughing, raising artful fists to heaven's iron gates and spitting scorn on hell's burning glass boardwalks, sharing Blake Genet and songs of Whitman, Charlie Parker's sax blow of young jazz America, the ring and hum of Autumn night, the running of the bullish, Buddhist helpless and hopeful children burning fuses and not waiting for the ink on crinkled page to dry. This Mrs Smith returning moment's glance sees in the glassy eyes of Kerouac's shadowed slump--not the tempest and lightning flash but the inward gaze--and this short phrase I remember while penning in a spiral Steno Notes 80 pages 6x9 sitting at the Sunset Bar and Restaurant at the edge of Guatemala's Lago de Atitlan in the bustling lake coast Mayan town of Panajachel, and I too am slumped but the gleaming daylight warms and the cool clouds bless. Diamond flickers of sunshine dance upon the metallic green of the water. A Mayan woman sits on a low wall above the lake bordering the coastal paved walk selling peanuts, cashews, almonds in gallon bags. Scoops buried in the bags stand waiting. Colorful Mayan traditional dress of vibrant greens and deep sea blue and fiery orange, and she lets the billowing girls hang. Her dark-skinned husband accompanies her on late lunchbreak, new blue jeans, gray red and white checkered flannel shirt, earth-brown Stetson. They both slowly lower strands of take-out spaghetti into their tiny daughters open mouth (I didn't see her behind the cart she was so small and unmoving). Volcanoes tower on the southwest coast in shimmering dark jungle green. Hot afternoon smoky white and ship's hull gray clouds churn and tatter in the Guatemalan rolling sky winds throwing shadows over the waters and summoning emerald bands of current and sparkling sunshine to race west across the long lake. Mountain ridges slope and stomp on onto Atitlan in greater enclosing hazes to the misty western ridges far along. Taxi boats skate across soft waves to ferry gringos to pleasures in Mayan towns of San Pedro, San Juan, or villages hidden in coves. Heavy white hull gray clouds bulge and plosh across the sky exploding flowers behind the volcanoes and dip and bow in the valleys between peaks, not two separate weather phenomena but a primordial dance of earth and sky.... A mariachi band has like an incoming tide drifted into the bar to serenade the Guatemalan afternoon, steely vibrato cry of horns. I hear the singer fill the valleys of quiet between the swarthy and pleading trumpeting peaks rising. The Mayan nut seller has I spy over my beer lifted her dirty-face tiny daughter up to stand upon shoulders to see and hear the trumpets and song. The little girl cranes her neck to see, toes pointed into her mother's dress...she waves at the music, and smiles wildly.