Road Trip! You Can't Go Home Again...

...but you can try.  I had a prior business arrangement in Oklahoma City, and so I hopped in my Blazer and made a weekend out of returning to the city of my birth.  The saying "You can't go home again" isn't exactly true.  You can, but both "you" and "home" have changed.  The minutes and miles have passed, time's erosion has done its damage.  But instead of waxing metaphoric about the roads traveled, let's put the pavement under foot and experience it ourselves.

Crossing the Red River, which has been shrunk to a small creek with the years long drought here, I was amazed to gaze not upon the "Welcome To Oklahoma" sign that I was expecting, but a huge sign, purple and gold, with a large arch, announcing to the world that a marvelous casino was just a few stops down the road.  I can only imagine a thousand years from now, when archaeologists explore the society of the Native people of this great land, they will find piles of poker chips and alcohol bottles.  It drives me crazy to think that the only way they can make a living is through building of casinos based on loopholes through the separate nation status that the Native Americans enjoy.  And no doubt that the owners of these places aren't "Indians" at all, but outsiders who are using the loophole to their greatest advantage. So you come across the abominations, a casino shaped like all the monuments of the Western World... not the world that should reflect their own heritage... ridiculous...

The area from Ardmore to Sulphur is peaked with slabs of Granite, Limestone, Shale, giant rocks with plateaus that stick out over the Interstate.  What I wouldn't give to stand upon those peaks and look out over the plains, to see for miles, with the Oklahoma wind blowing and the dry heat of the summer. It would be certainly glorious!  And beyond those slabs of rock is Turner Falls, which I've never been to, but from the pictures I've seen of the waterfalls and the river valleys, it is someplace I will certainly explore when the weather turns back warm, the Good Lord willing...

Driving through the town of Davis (past the new Choctaw Casino....), I see the same little town I remember from the 80's.  Sooner's Foods is still where it was, with the darkened isles and the stubborn tenacity to remain in business while Walmarts spring up throughout the area.  And the small shack where we bought firecrackers to set off at the Lake House is still there, still advertising its wares.  There's the turn-off to the Lake House (now cornered by a McDonald's and a Walmart), and past the Chickashaw Heritage Center, a place where they have stored how they used to live so that it won't be lost in neon lights, rounding the corners where mobile homes, A-frame Houses, and people that have lived there for decades still live, still sitting on their front porches and listening to the cicadas in the trees and the wasps building a nest in the corner of the porch.  That's the Oklahoma I remember, taking myself forward on the road and backward through time.  I turn off onto the gravel road that turns to the lakehouse, past the bumps and the hills, but there are new road signs, and Hilltop Road is actually what we called Rock Drive (and that's what it's named on Google Earth, see my prior blog about the discovery), and I drive to the end of the road... to find the gate closed and the grass growing high.  It woudn't surprise me if the bank owned now, from whatever people bought the house after my Grandmother sold it.  The road was the same, and although I was different, it felt good to find my way to one of my homes.

Drove down to the end of the road to the Lake of the Arbuckles, and found that the drought had hurt the lake something fierce.  The buoy that signified "No Boats" was so close to "shore" I could have walked out and touched it.  It's funny, because I remember that buoy being so far out in the middle of the lake, I could never have swum out to it.  But something tells me it's not the drought that made it look odd.  The lake may have grown smaller, but I've grown bigger, and those distances aren't so far anymore.

Pulling into Oklahoma City, the old knowledge of the roads took over, and it would be impossible to get lost.  I asked my mother where every road in town went, and I knew it by heart.  Having time prior to my meetings, I drove out to Westbury, where I used to live.  The outlet malls along I-40 and Rockwell look just as bad as the casinos, but at least they tried to approximate the teepees and other colors of the Native Americans.  The truck stops had grown larger, a sign of prosperity (the outlet mall had sold all of it's shops well before it was even made, and three additions later, it's still full) in the Grand Old State. The houses and roads of neighborhoods newer than anything I knew of (I last was here in 2005) grew up like the grass in the fields, spreading out for miles.  And there is the neighborhood I lived in, the street, the house.... and it looks good! Someone has repainted it and it still looks as I remembered it.   I drove to both my grandparent's houses as well, and they looked okay, both sold long ago and now have new tenants. It's good to take a dip into the past.

I sat upon the bench in front of Mustang Valley Elementary School and called those who I wanted to meet, and while some were out of town, others were there and available.  Mustang Valley look exactly the same... except they paved over the playground to make a parking lot (cue Joni Mitchell) , and the new playground is plastic and safe and looks like the things they are supposed to represent.  We made the rocket ship into such a place, and the Spider, and the gigantic Teeter-Totters that I'm sure would have spawned lawsuits today... but it used to be my playground (see prior blog for that, as well).

I went to visit my mother's friends who agreed to let me stay the night, and we went to BJ's Brewhouse and I had some wonderful Balsamic Glazed Chicken with White Cheddar Mashed Potatoes.  I also went to see the Granddaughter of Robert Orbach, my grandmother's boss.  I found, while cleaning out my house, a scrapbook of all of the goings on of Orbach's Department Store, along with the writings he did on his own Printing Press.  I brought the scrapbook to them, as I felt it would the only place on Earth it would be appreciated.  I was so right on this, as they had lost a lot of Mr. Orbach's writings in a house fire a couple of years ago.  It made me feel good to bring them home.

One other thing I did was to drive to the east side of Oklahoma City and visit the Omniplex (okay, yes, it's now called Science Museum Oklahoma, but to me, it will always be the Omniplex).  It was like reliving my childhood.  Some things had changed, some were the same as I'd always known it.  The balls that rode along their prospective tracks have been doing it for as long as I remember.  I stood there watching it for quite a bit, as it was, if nothing else in that city, the idea that, in a world where change is inevitable, there are always those points of constancy. It made me feel good.  I missed the pendulum, slowly swinging with the power of the Earth's Rotation, and the Geodesic Dome Playset (which probably was taken away when someone got hurt and wanted to sue...).  The Earthquake display was still there, showing that same movie with actors with 80's clothes.  The planetarium did their daily show, and I went into the darkened room with the night sky projected on the domed ceiling and relaxed.... until a family with 8 kids came in and sat behind me... all with attention spans of 30 seconds.  Last time I'd been there, the guy doing the show probably hadn't even been born.  It was a perfect ending to my trip, my look back into my past.  

There's a certain confidence I found there, to see everything that had changed, mutated (the casinos and outlet malls), and grown up all around the city. And so had I.  I could now drive anywhere I wanted, go anywhere, and I had the ability to do it.  I brought things home, even as I had come home, to a certain extent.  But in the end, I drove back to Dallas, to my apartment, to my job, and to my home.  And I'll go back... there's so many people I didn't get to see, places (like the OKC Bombing Memorial and Bricktown) that I want to visit, but there will always be time for that.  Just 3 hours north.  A short jaunt, as the hawk flies.
 

Recess from the Recesses (a response)

[From my Facebook page, J. pointed out that many children still enjoy going outside, and gave examples.  She says that adults still produce playground sets (albeit "safer" ones) and create the memories that children produce for themselves.  In the end, she says, "Each generation must move on to make room for the next, yes?"  This is my response.  I agree with much of what she says, with two exceptions. That, one, I don't hold the same optimism that children will, in the future, be running around in their neighborhoods using sticks as wands or weapons or whatever. And two, that the equipment that we played on is just as good for this generation as today's "safer" replacements.]

I do hope you are correct in your evaluation of today's children. That in the areas where we live there are still kids that yearn to go outside, to play on playgrounds, to wield a stick as a sword or a staff, to find a copse of trees and turn it into a quiet hut,  a mansion of greens.  But I just don't see it happening that way.  Imagination is taken up by video games, by television screens, or transformed into competition in the form of organized sports.  When I was in middle and high school, there were few kids that "came out to play" in the summer, as they were all being bussed off to soccer camps and constant practices for organized sports (soccer in my neighborhood was the most time consuming). If they weren't into sports, they were inside playing with video games or whathaveyou.  And my neighborhood was as barren as most ghost towns. 

When I go back even farther, I look at the playgrounds as one of the few places where I actually half-way interacted with other kids. Not that I did that well, but I did have a few friends and we played our make believe games from the popular TV shows at the time.  The playground equipment became the models for our spaceships, our fortresses...etc. I realize that any brand of equipment could do that, whether it be plastic, or wood, or be it abstract, a mere shape, or constructed to look like a castle.  The importance of the specific rocketships I talk about are because of the memories that we had of those particular playsets. It is a selfish notion, really, that those metal structures could stay rooted into the ground for all eternity, for every child to experience those exact memories.  We are living our lives through them.  But it's precisely that selfish notion that makes us hold on to old things as much as we do. 

Take a look at one of my older blogs, from July of last year, which analyzes a conversation between Lt. Commander Data and Dr. Soong, his maker, from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's very applicable to this one, as we tend to hold on to old things, the crumbling buildings of southern towns, those like the ones in Milledgeville towering above the old Governor's mansion, with missing roof parts and piles of old psychology files stashed about.  Or to look at it another way, the loft apartments at the Mill in Porterdale. Living there would be an absolute treat, as the old factory walls would still retain the echoes of decades before, mixed in with the waterfalls of the South River.  We hold on to our ties with our pasts, yearning for them to stay eternally on, comforting us, reminding us of our semi-permanence in this world. For looking back to our past gives a sense of continuity, of a chain of humans living from one century to the next.  What if, traveling back to Oklahoma some time, and seeing my old playground at Mustang Valley, with the old rocketship monkey bars shining in the sunlight, and there on it was a child reaching up to the top of the set, and seeing his face as he reached the top.  That would be me in another life, but it would also be me now. It would be joy continuing down through the years.  So yes, it is selfish, but it is perfectly human to wish the old structures of our youth to continue existing, for us or for others, forever.  It gives us a sense of immortality. It's why I write these blogs, or why anyone creates anything, as it provides a link to the future.  After I am gone, there will still be these blogs for people to read, to know about my life.  I had hoped that there would still have been that rocketship for people to play on, to find the same excitement as I did. Let the children make the memories of their own worlds, at least I still have mine.

***
Something I think needs to be added.  When we talk about why Mustang Valley's playground was replaced with brand new sets, we have to look at the potential for lawsuits for "unsafe" playground equipment.  The large monkey bar sets at Mustang Valley were fastened into concrete, as were the teeter totters.  The swing sets were just outside on barren dirt, often which had holes underneath where kids' feet had swung, and when it rained, you got tadpoles swimming about in the holes under the swings.  The rocketship was also in the dirt.  They did not have the recycled tire clippings, or safe rubber ground to keep children from falling and skinning their knees and breaking an arm or whatever.  Truth is, the skinned knees is part of what made those sets fun.  There was danger involved.  Nowadays, if anyone is put in danger, the school system gets sued.  It's the litigious society that we have that keeps children from actually being children.  Would, in the middle ages, children have been allowed to work as apprentices for blacksmiths or become squires for knights if the people thought they might get hurt, and hence, the shop owners would get sued for negligence or something... of course not.  If, as a kid, I burnt my finger while trying to touch a hot iron, to see how hot it was, the pain afterwards was a lesson in life.  In taking away the pain, we take away the lesson involved.  I'd rather have the scars than be blemish free, and have learned nothing. 

This Used to be My Playground

If you drive up to Lake Hefner in Oklahoma City, and turn into one of the lakeside parks, you will see, at least I think, a playground of immense size and stature, towering over the lake. I am sure that the rocketship that was built at the park was not as big as the one in my imagination, looking back at those days, when my grandmother would take my brother and I the many blocks to this amazing structure. It was the fusion of man's understanding of the child's imagination. I have seen very little, before or since, that blended together steel and matter with the underlying dreams in a child's mind. To me, it was an arduous rampway to the top of the rocket. In my mind, the ramp was closed in, usually filled with children, and actually a bit scary. In the photos I've seen, it was an open walkway, much like the breezeways above interstates. It's amazing how memories change, mold themselves into something larger and more ominous than what they truly were. And how sad it made me, to look down from the satellites of Google's all seeing eye and zoom into the playground I once played in, and see the rocketship gone.

Same state, but drive, then, to the school I went to as a child, Mustang Valley Elementary, and there you will find monkey bars of various shapes, including a rocket-shaped one. So many battles were fought on that rocket ship, of Thundercats and Transformers, with my friends, Timothy and Drew and all the others, amazing times. And come to think of it, I probably got more exercise in those days than anything else. I wasn't all that overweight then, although you would never have known that by the Presidential Physical fitness tests scores I had. What fun is there in running around a gym field, with asthma threatening to creep in and the dandelions and the wasps and whatnot always lurking about? It's no fun. But being Lion-O...now that is something different. It was our own little world then, and I loved it.

[Addendum... looking for pictures of that place, I find that Mustang Valley renovated (read, took all the fun out of) the playground, taking the slides, the swings, the huge teeter totters, the beloved rocket ship, everything away, and replaced it with safer, more boring play toys. Curse them for taking away such treasures. Now children will not be able to use their imaginations and play on the dangerous wonders that truly made us children. And looking at Google, all the trees around the school have been cut down to make room for neighborhoods and houses. At least we still have our memories.][If we have to be safe all the time, we will never face danger. Climbing to the top of the Monkey Bars and standing upon the zenith of the rocket ship... it is like conquering a mountain. And if we fall... our skinned knees will have been well worth it.]

One more playground story, before I get to where I really want to take this entry. There still is a quaint little playground located just to the west of the dorms of Georgia College in Milledgeville. Nothing special about them, except for the memories I had of the swing sets there, where in my Freshman year the Ramsey twins (whom I have not heard from since then) and some of our other friends, would go and swing under the shade of the giant pine trees. It really was refreshing, the cool winds going down into the river valley, even in summer. So it was a great shock to me that one year, after returning back to campus, I wandered over to the park to see that every pine tree had been cut down, leaving a brown, ugly surface around all the playground equipment. During the hot days, the sun would beat down upon the metal fixtures and make them too hot to touch, especially for the little children that played on them. I could easily see them getting 1st degree burns from the heated metal. What good is a playground without the trees around it? The shade is metaphor as well as real. The real world cannot get to you for that little while you are on the swing sets. To see those trees cut down and the park destroyed, in spirit, was depressing.

***

Now, I venture, these playgrounds lay barren and empty for most of the time. They become hangouts for gangs and drug dealers (that was a problem, apparently, for the Stars and Stripes Park). The innocence leaves and is left only by the leftovers, by the people longing to get back to that time, but never making it through chemicals and violence. No, the playgrounds are empty. Schools have had to cut back the recess time to provide more education for failing test scores (and not for the children that take them), and city budget cuts have made replacing old equipment impossible, so the grass grows up between the iron monkey bars and cracks form on the pavement. It reminds me of Ray Bradbury's "The Pedestrian," which, if you haven't read it, go find a copy on the Internet, it should be there. I'll wait, it's only a 1.5 pages long.

http://mikejmoran.typepad.com/files/pedestrian-by-bradbury-1.pdf

For in that story, the citizens of that fictional country lived within their houses, fixated on the moving lights of the television screens, and the lone walker outside is picked up by a robot police officer and taken to the asylum as if he was a crazy person.

Our playgrounds today are no longer the steel beams of playground rocketships or, in another since, of the rocketships that are made of the words in books. Rather, they are the images of those forms in computer games, on television. The playgrounds we visit to escape reality, to stretch our imaginations across vast spaces, those places exist only within our minds. They exist as bytes and pixels on a computer screen. Whereas we might have fought against real imaginary dragons on the school playground, now people slaughter virtual dragons in the caves of Warcraft or other games. We chase girls (or gossip about guys) not on the pavement of a schoolground playplace, but rather on the public grounds of Facebook. It's all the same in reality. Why shouldn't we all just spend our recesses texting each other and saying nothing? Not long are the days when the playful screams of children will fall silent on school playgrounds as they talk more through the keyboards on their cell phones than with their mouths. In future times, when I am old and gray, and children who may be quite used to space travel, will ask me if I've ever been in space, I will say, "Yes, although my feet have never left the ground."

[Okay... now I'm just ticked... all the playgrounds I played in as a child are gone, replaced with safer, more boring pieces of plastic. Damn the lawyers and their litigation. I want danger! I want to climb to the top of the monkey bars and look out over the cement playground and watch people skin their knees! I'm gonna scan pictures from my yearbook of the playground, and also provide links of sites I find that deal with preserving playgrounds and monkey bars and all the things we loved as kids. ]