My child is blessed to be born near the fall equinox, and so I found myself lying in the basket swing of his new swingset (a birthday present) yesterday morning, enjoying the first cool whether of the year, while he happily chattered and repeatedly ascended and descended his slide when a peculiar thing happened. I imagined that he might slide these tiny wooden cars he has down the slide where they would fly off into the grass, perhaps be to be forgotten, their tiny chrome hubcaps becoming flecked with minute patches of rust over which a finger could pass and feel a slight texture.
I’m tempted to say that this idle image became peculiarly vivid in my mind as I swung back and forth looking at the sky, but that is not accurate. It is more accurate to say that the image became suffused with a sense significance quite larger than the things in it and, in any case, disjoint from them. As though I was staring at a key or a door the use of which would remove me radically from the context in which I was currently living and transport me elsewhere, like closing a particularly engrossing book and being surprised to return to an entirely distinct sequence of events: your own life.
“Want to play in the sandbox,” Felix said, and so I got up to open it for him and, very gradually, the sensation diminished.