A young boy stood below the first rung at the end of the monkey bars looking up. He’s big for his age. So many kids are. He might be eleven years old, a little over five feet tall and probably about a hundred-and-forty pounds. There are seven or eight wooden exercise stations dotting a half-mile stretch along the river. They were built as part of a get fit Memphis push. People use them every day, but it’s mostly dudes with bulging biceps doing pull-ups at the pull-up station.
The boy’s sister stood to the side. Not sure if he knew what to do, she told him he has to make his way across. Filled with uncertainty, mostly about his physical ability to hold on and muscle his way from rung to rung, the child dropped to the ground, ran to the end of the bars and proclaimed, “I did it!” He said it two more times as his sister turned and walked away. He jogged to catch up and trailed her by five or six feet as they followed the sidewalk curving away from the fitness stations toward the center of the park.
**A note about narrative detail: I wrote these paragraphs three different ways with the only difference being race. A young boy, while accurate, felt clinical and lacking. A young, black child felt like I was intentionally drawing the reader’s attention to race. I had one version where I gave the child the ethnically suggestive name Da’Ron. That felt the least intrusive in terms of telling the story, but it’s also the least accurate – I don’t know the child’s name, and again, I was acutely aware of race. Does any of it matter? I think so, but I can’t quite explain why. It’s a little like saying that the sun was high or the grass was still wet with morning dew or that a tree floated in the river thirty feet from the shore line**
“I did it! I did it!” These are the small white lies we tell ourselves, and those who might or might not have been watching. Innocent enough, but of what consequence? I doubt the kid will become a serial liar – though I don’t doubt that in a few years he might be talking that locker room talk and exaggerating things that didn’t happen in the night – where his hands might have gone as he and his friends look at a group of girls on the opposite street corner. We lie for approval, we lie to fit in, we lie as a joke and a way of safely pushing the envelope, or envisioning what might one day be possible. And to be fair, I don’t even like to call it a lie – it feels so much less serious than that.
This scene, this way of making sense of the world just beyond the reach of our capabilities, became my thought experiment for a good portion of yesterday’s morning walk. It sent me back to baseball camp as I thought about some stories from my past.
At camp, a coach, a scout for the Cleveland Indians, told me I did a decent job pitching. It became inflated to a scout watched me and liked what he saw – to I was scouted by the Cleveland Indians (or something just beneath that type of statement). The reality is that he was paid to coach kids and tell them they did a good job… He wasn’t there entirely in his capacity as a scout, but it sounds so much better to say I was scouted by major league team. My dad thought it was pretty cool. I would later feel embarrassed by his retellings of the story. I did it.
Another year at camp, or maybe it was the same year, I remember there was a really cute young girl that was staying in our dorm – girls’ tennis camp was on the top floor. I was young, maybe in sixth grade and the youngest kid at camp. One day, early in the week when I came into the dorm or maybe I was leaving my room, a bunch of older kids surrounded me and ushered me in to the elevator – they seemed like giant trees standing next to me. Someone made a joke about it smelling like Cheeto farts (I hadn’t farted, but I did just finish a whole bunch of cheese-its). They took me up to the seventh floor, shoved me into this girl’s room and shut the door (or maybe stood in the doorway watching). She was really pretty, long blond hair, tan legs and short tennis shorts. I have no idea how long I was in there, if I said anything, if she said anything, or if the guys held the door shut as I tried to leave. I think she ignored me in the way girls that age do – stupid boys and their stupid boy behavior. After that, I kept lookout for her. I tried to cross her path every time I could, hoping she might notice me – to no avail. We might have talked once towards the end of camp. My memory is just fuzzy enough that I could go anywhere with it. In one version in my mind, she confronted me a few days later – she didn’t like that things were being said about her. I didn’t make up any stories about those few terrifyingly awkward minutes, but for the rest of the week, I could sense that stories had been made up (seemingly in my favor)… I didn’t do anything to find out what was being said or stop it. In their minds, I did it.
After recounting my days at camp, and thinking about how it was the first time I owned deodorant and a jockstrap, and how I was still such a young kid – enamored with the glow in the dark hands on my alarm clock or the fact that I had all of these snacks just to myself…. I began to think about these minor incidents in life and the jumping off points that they could serve, but almost never do. As I walked yesterday morning, I came back, mentally, to the kid and the monkey bars.
In the TV commercial version of his story, maybe it becomes about coaching and hard work. The sister becomes more encouraging, “fool, you didn’t do nothing. Go on back and try again.” (apologies for ethnic dialect, but it’s how people speak here). Maybe it’s a commercial for the army or a brokerage firm or a community college. There’s a montage of him failing, and trying again and again. His body grows lean and muscular until he’s fully-grown and in uniform – distinguished with that blend of hardened steel but kind eyes and smile – or he’s in a cap and gown. All those little moments of failure and uncertainty until he can actually say I did it. This is how we grow up.
The poet would make this moment about the insignificant lies we tell ourselves, our employers, our lovers, our children and how those small untruths shield us from the larger world of cold indifferences.
The novelist would use that moment as the splitting off of two lives. Maybe the sister isn’t paying any attention at all because she’s texting with a guy who she’ll meet up with later in the week, one who will take advantage of her and send her life down one path as her brother’s life goes down a different path. From here she might become pregnant, or abused, or addicted, or left crying in a dark room while her younger brother only sees the outside wreckage and the growing distance between them. Or maybe her indifference in that moment and his getting away with his I did it white lie foreshadows a child left to raise himself and falling into the wrong crowd, or left to raise himself and finding his way to great heights. From this point by the monkey bars so many tragedies and successes become possible.
The memoirist would use the moment as a mirror for his or her own life and times when they’ve claimed to have done it when they really hadn’t.
The academic would write an article about the psychology of self-talk and its relationship to achievement, or something like that.
Me… I’ll just take a few notes on my phone and feel disappointed that I didn’t really pursue any of those writerly paths. I’ll lament my lazy mind and my inability to pick one approach and stick with it. I’ll see a missed opportunity to explore and wander around their lives or my life or this larger thing called life. I’ll write a crappy little blog post (because I’m still very much practicing and stretching my imagination) and proclaim:
“I did it!”