Today’s episode is guest hosted by Maggie Smith.

Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

When I was six years old, my family moved to a house with a creek running behind it. It was the ideal suburban backyard for three little girls with wild imaginations. My two younger sisters and I spent hours, so many hours wading in the water, catching minnows and crawdads, and building rock bridges from one side to the other. We even tried to raft down it once or twice on inflatable pool rafts, Huck Finn style, with no real success.

I grew up pre-Internet, pre-cell phones. For most of my childhood we didn’t have cable TV or a VCR. If I had free time, I was riding my bike, playing outside, or reading a book. We call it “free range” now—the idea that children don’t need to be constantly supervised and entertained. There’s something about being left to your own devices, and having to be resourceful. Free time is an incomparable gift. It’s time to dream, time to imagine your way out of your own boredom, time to invent games or build things with your own two hands.

I’m raising my own children as free-range as possible. Their summers for the past few years have looked a lot like mine growing up. Most days my son leaves the house after breakfast, and only comes home for meals or to reapply sunscreen or grab a drink. Sometimes he shows up with a ragtag group of friends, their hair damp with sweat, their knees grass-stained. “Mom,” he asks, “do we have enough popsicles for everybody?”

Watching them all plop down on the grass out front, laughing and eating popsicles together, it’s like 1983 in my childhood neighborhood all over again. The memories come flooding back.

The setting of today’s poem speaks to me for obvious reasons, but there’s something else that resonated with me: the absurdity of being embodied. Of being contained. Our lives feel so enormous, so timeless, so uncontainable, so brimming with memory and feeling, and yet here we are in these bodies that will absolutely expire. I think about this more than I can say.

Our Bodies
by Michael Bazzett

We used to ditch them after school,

dropping them in the lush grass
that grew where the trestle bridge 
crossed the creek and everything
smelled of fish and tarred timber.

Then we sank to the silty bottom 
of the stream and stared up 
through the rusty water for hours

without worrying about breathing,

and when trains rumbled overhead
raining gravel and cinders down 
into the creek, we did not blink.

Afterward we crept back to where
our bodies lay tangled in the grass,
still as two steamed fish on a plate,

and we peered into our empty eyes

then climbed back into our skins
and felt heavy at first and too thick,

and sometimes you would even cry 
a little on the way home and when 
I’d try to comfort you, you’d say,

No it’s okay, sometimes it just hits 
me this way, living inside a body.

“Our Bodies” by Michael Bazzett from THE TEMPLE © 2020 Michael Bazzett. Used by permission of Bull City Press.