Mini Cycle Demons

My childhood was a web of dreams and realities, inseparable and indistinguishable from one another. I lived in a quiet neighborhood hidden by hills of overgrown wildlife, full of trees, sand, streams, paths, and little boys. My entire world was wrapped in this knot of winding streets and the woodlands between them. I sang with fairy princesses atop boulders and embarked on a series of adventures with my bloody-kneed comrades through mysterious paths in the forest. The arms of my climbing tree stretched across my mother’s flowerbed, and I’d sit up there for hours imagining pixies inside the petal walls of tulips and lilies. To me, the split-level I lived in was a palace crawling with secret passageways, equipped with a full stage disguised as the brick platform in front of the fireplace. The storage area beneath the stairs was the headquarters for a secret club, the fence was a balance beam, the mulch garden was a market, and the rock near the flowerbed was a spaceship. When I found four-leaf clovers, I’d hide them in a sappy crevice of my favorite elm, which would swallow it up and digest its magic, earning its name, “The Lucky Tree.” My soulmate was a pink banana-seat Schwinn with blue and white stars, a bell, a basket, and neon noisemakers on the spokes. Plastic tassels dangled from the handles and various stickers speckled the bars. I mastered the art of coasting down steep hills with no hands, raising them to the sky and throwing my head back in pure liberation. My hair would dance as the horizon rose and I rolled deeper into the neighborhood valley, where all of the kids would gather at sunset to play ghost games. We’d invade the empty streets as a flock of mini cycle demons, skidding through sun-baked sand and popping wheelies atop crumbling curbs. Once the sun had fallen asleep in its bed of treetops, we’d drop our bikes on the grass and each place a foot in a circle of toes that would determine, through a rhyming elimination process with rude language, who was the first to be “it.” As soon as one foot was left, everyone would scatter and whoever was “it” would begin counting without hesitation, covering his eyes and reciting times...”One o’clock, two o’clock...” until he eagerly hit “Midnight!!!” and began hunting through every nook and shadow for ghosts before they haunted his “ghouls” and earned safety.I don't know where this is going....... Written April 9th, 2002 © on May 22 2002 05:49 AM PST   other