ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 25, 1996 TAG: 9603250105
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Monty S. Leitch
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
IT MIGHT have been an ordinary day. Instead, I spent it with a nearly-3-year-old who, as children always will, showed me something marvelous.
His name is Ian, and over and over throughout the day he told me proudly, ``My mom's a genius.''
Ian and I walked along the riverbank. We blew bubbles onto the cement floor of the garage. We made scary puppets from No. 2 cone coffee filters, and we played like monkeys on the bunk beds. He sang me his mother's special bedtime song, and I let him play with my Slinky.
Now, the story of how I came to own a Slinky is long and not so interesting. Suffice it to say that one day I just took a notion, and the next thing I knew I was cruising the toy aisles of Wal-Mart.
These days, I discovered, Slinky purchasers have many options. Metal, plastic, green, orange, pink. I chose a bright orange plastic Slinky: yellow-orange on one side of its flattened coils and red-orange on the other.
It won't work, though, on the quirky, crooked steps in my house. But the steps in Ian's house were perfect. On almost the first try we ``walked'' that Slinky all the way to the bottom.
``Do it again!'' he squealed delightedly. I was delighted, too. So I ran down the steps, retrieved the Slinky, and did it again.
And again, and again, and again, and again. Ian is an unusually persistent nearly-3-year-old. He tires of no activity easily. Finally, I said, ``Let's take a little break.''
``Do it again,'' he said.
Now, here's the marvelous thing.
I did it again.
Even after I thought I'd been defeated by fatigue, even after I thought I'd climbed those stairs as many times as I could climb them, I did it again. I reached down inside myself, I stretched out my reserves, I recovered a new balance with the situation, and I did it again.
When was the last time you watched a Slinky ``walk'' the stairs? They are stunningly simple toys, loaded with meaning.
As this Slinky walks, it changes color: light-to-dark, light-to-dark, or dark-to-light, dark-to-light. It is, itself, both at once. Optimist and pessimist. Sunshine and shadow. There are both qualities, moving together in an intricacy that defies separation. Where does the light start? Where does the shadow stop?
If you watch a Slinky, you'll see, too, that it walks only by stretching, constantly giving up balance for imbalance, but then, inevitably, recovering balance again. Over the course of my day with Ian, he kept returning to my scissors: a child-sized pair of blunt-nose scissors I'd bought, along with some magazines to cut. With patient persistence, he worked and worked with those scissors. They presented him quite a challenge. He had to stretch his fingers wide. He had to teeter on the brink of failure, over and over again, before achieving the cut. But achieve the cut he did. Every time. And then he was ready to try again.
The Slinky walked down the stairs, and I brought it back up. It walked down, and then again down, and then again down, each trip involving a circling back up: a spiral of progress in time and space, caught by analogy in the Slinky spirals themselves.
Stretch out. Lose balance, sometimes on your shadow side, sometimes on your bright. The many connected circles in which you walk will bring you back, inevitably, to balance again.
And again. And again.
Marvelous.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times columnist.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB