Tire

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We lived in an apartment for a while, when I was around seven or eight; it had a little playground in the middle, with swings and climbing bars and things like that. Over to one side of the normal swings there was a tire swing. I never liked it very much.

Part of it might've been the way it was mounted; the stereotypical tire swing is just a tire hung over a tree limb with a rope, swinging freely and hopefully not in the direction of the trunk. (Splat.)

This tire swing, though, was hung UFO-style, with four chains spaced around the top all connected to a central point. Up to four kids could sit on the tire, knees bumping against each other in the center hole, or backs to each other and legs swinging free around the tire's outer edge. The chains were hooked up to a thing that spun both clockwise and counter-. And that, basically, was the tire swing. It could swing back and forth a little, but the chains didn't have much give. Mainly kids would sit on it and get someone to set it spinning.

Say what you will about ways to have fun, but I find that spinning rapidly in circles while inhaling the tarry smell of an old tire gets unfun fast.

This is not to say that I didn't play on the tire swing sometimes. Kids have short attention spans, and no doubt at times everything else in the playground seemed so boring that self-imposed dizziness presented a viable alternative. Still, as much as the stereotypical idyllic childhood involves long summers spent swinging under the branch of the ol' apple tree, I'm afraid I seem to have missed out.

At least I graduated from regular playground usage early enough to mostly avoid those modern hamster-tubing monstrosities they make by recycling tires. If I want to feel like a small rodent, I'll chew on some sunflower seeds.



Yeah, so this one is autobiographical, not fiction. I'm allowed.