Wind Chimes

Tags

childhood, memory, wind chimes

Many of my friends are, like me, young, just starting out in careers (or still unsure of whether “career” is really the right word), and transient, unsettled. We pick up and move often, even if only across town. We rent apartments or duplexes or houses and have minimal furniture.

Most of us don’t have things like 12-place-settings of china, matching living room furniture, or wind chimes. I can’t remember the last time I heard wind chimes, so a few days ago when I heard the melodious tinkling of wind chimes, it made me stop for a moment.

Sometimes a sound has the power to instantly transport one to faraway places — places separated by space and time. I heard the sound of the low chime — clear like a bell — and could see my grandmother’s deck and the swinging wind chimes.

Hers were aluminum and fairly long, so they sounded like bells and not the tinny kind, but not quite as low as church bells. It fascinated me as a child to see the wind stir the hollow tubes and the wooden clapper to make music.

I could almost feel a cool mountain breeze on my face and hear her chimes, could almost taste the watery lemonade and boxed gingersnaps, could almost hear the adults’ conversation as we sat outside on old deck chairs. The deck was faded red and the trees behind deep green. We would have a snack outside after returning from the pool for a swim, usually because an afternoon thunderstorm forced an early departure.

Grandmama would pull out frozen lemonade mix, invariably add too much water, and one of the grandchildren would stir the mix in the glass pitcher with an old wooden spoon, watching the yellowish liquid swirl and the frozen mix dissolve. Another grandchild would be sent to fetch my grandfather from his reading, to be sociable and eat a snack.

Those were happy, lazy afternoons.

And then the sounds died away and I was back in my own life, driving to work on a hot summer morning.

There was such a sense of permanence to those afternoons that stretched before us, eating cookies and drinking lemonade on my grandmother’s deck while we dried off from our trip to the pool.

Why don’t we have wind chimes? Are they too permanent? They aren’t the sort of thing one really needs to set up housekeeping, the way one needs a table and chairs or plates and glasses, but they belong to the category of finishing touches, something I often lack.

It does seems a shame though. Small odd things have a way of sticking with you, and the vivid memory, recalled by a single sound, can never be replaced. Perhaps I should look into purchasing a set of wind chimes. Not the little tinkly ones, but the deep, sonorous kind that ring in your ears and give song to the breeze.

Shared Experiences

Tags

childhood, dysentery, oregon trail, ubiquitous American experience

Growing up, my family was somewhat unplugged from media. We did own a TV, but only watched for short periods of time and only a couple days a week, we didn’t listen to the radio that much (though time was made for “music appreciation”), we owned no Nintendo or Nintendo-esque games, and didn’t even have computer games until I was in middle school.

Ok. Now that you feel sorry for poor deprived me, I can continue with the surprising fact that there was one computer game with which I was familiar as a girl: Oregon Trail.

I use this as evidence for my theory that playing Oregon Trail was ubiquitous of my generation’s (or at least half a generation’s) social education. If you are at a party of twenty-something’s and stuck for a discussion topic, bring up this game of adventure and faux history and you will 1) boost your humor points and 2) buy yourself 5-10 minutes of conversation.

Obviously I will choose to ford the river

Yes, Oregon Trail in all its primitive-graphics glory was a cornerstone of American education. Everyone can commiserate and reminisce about having a member of their fictitious party break a bone or two, having their wagon wheels float down the river, going hunting and shooting 3000 pounds of buffalo (even though you know  you can carry only 50 back to camp, thus explaining, in my mind at least, why buffalo went extinct in the West), and let’s not forget the perennial favorite: dying of dysentery.

I think dysentery was funny mostly because none of us knew what it was until we went home and asked our parents, who then wondered what company we’d been keeping. And it was funny thereafter because what child doesn’t appreciate a good dysentery joke?

But I digress. It is strange to me that a primitive game about crossing the continent should have become such a shared experience. We may not have all watched the same TV shows (most of my free time was spent outside building forts, having pine cone wars, arranging picnics, and putting on endless plays with the same plot for my long-suffering parents), but one thing I do share with others of my generation: that glorious moment when the computer screen announced that my party had arrived in the mythical Oregon.

p.s. Did Oregon Trail inspire young people of my generation to move to that state? I wonder if there’s any way to tell if a positive correlation exists?