So this past Monday was a haibun prompt from Frank at dVerse Poets. The prompt is here and emphasizes “silver”.
(I did stretch things a bit for a haibun)
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Austin Road Elementary school, Mahopac NY, early 1970’s.
In the back of the school sat the playground, some basketball hoops, a baseball diamond, grass in an open field that, to the left, as you faced it, sloped slowly up a lazy hill to some broken rock walls lining the top and the sides and over and beyond but here squaring the top of that hill like an uncomfortable, torn hat.
That was our boundary as maybe it had been for some farmer at another time, our boundary that we weren’t to cross, the only stipulation being, if we were to wander up the hill, to just make sure that we stayed in sight.
Well, it was the early 70’s and our teachers weren’t always all that vigilant while grabbing their smoke breaks and coffee and “minding” us. As long as our heads were counted at the end of recess they were good.
My best friend, Dave, and I in an early spring, with a step just beyond our wall squared confine and out of sight, through a break in one of the walls even further up the slope, further to the left, discovered the bones of a roofless old car, with rotted seats, gaps where the doors had been, tire rims and a still steering wheel and tall stick shift. Dave and I and a couple of friends we recruited after the discovery, were always chomping at the bit for recess so we could get to that car as it became our spaceship, specifically the shiny magical flying silver “Jupiter 2” from “Lost in Space” as, every day, while playing our designated roles of Will, the Major, Penny and Judy, we would also trade off one of us getting to play the robot (oh my, a dual role!) that gleaming also magical silver (just like the Jupiter 2) metal behemoth of a glass headed mechanical friend and protector with fancy weapons and the coolest robot voice while we re-enacted some of the show’s stories or made up our own.
But the real excitement was which one of us today, in our trade off, would get to wave our arms dramatically and frantically in the midst of whatever new danger presented itself to us in our latest space tale, which one of us would get to yell “Danger Will Robinson!” or which one of us would simply just say “It does not compute” to whatever story we were playing that maybe had hit a bit of a creative lull.
We didn’t have a Mom and Dad Robinson in our old, long ago abandoned car silver dream Jupiter 2 imagination. They just smoked their cigarettes and drank their coffee down the hill from us on this strange new planet.
And none of us, even if we had an extra friend join in our fun, ever played the Doctor either. EVER. He was just a meanie.
And, well, we also weren’t jaded and conniving and cynical and devious enough to pull that off just yet.
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Gleaming alien sun’s
robot protects my childhood
fondly from today
frankenberrysattic.com 