Swinger

I have always loved swing sets. Even though one of my most ignominious defeats came as a direct result of my misuse of swing technology, I still carry a lingering joy in my heart whenever I pass by a school or park with a full complement of swings along with the compulsory play structure.
I grew up with a swing set in my back yard. Before the gravel pit was turned into my father's zucchini patch, we had a pair of swings and a glider, painted in what must at one time have been attractive shades of red and green, but mostly I remember them with a rusty patina. The feeling of the chains going slack at the top of the arc, back and forth, with the hope that you might flip over the top if you kicked hard enough. The danger was more in the flat metal seats that warmed in the heat of the sun to roughly the temperature of liquid magma.
Then there were the swings at school. No one spent a lot of time being amused by the swings on the primary playground. They were fine for kindergarten, but just a few hundred feet away were the upper grade swings. They towered above even the backstops and tether ball poles. They were the tallest structure on the playground. They had the black rubber seat that wrapped around you as you sat down, and cradled you as you climbed higher and higher. They also allowed a good deal of free-form play. By wrapping the two outside swings around the poles, one could sit in the middle and move, slowly at first, side to side. Eventually you could make large ovals covering the range of all three swings, and if you were very daring, you could reach out with one hand and grab one pole to hang, for a moment, before returning to the odd pattern of left and right, around and around.
Then there was the option of lying face down, with the seat on your belly, and twisting up the chain above you until your feet barely touched the ground, then lifting your feet to spin spread-eagled until momentum or your own nausea caught up to you. It is precisely this activity that I believe was a precursor to my later fondness for mind-altering substances. But after all that, it was always best to turn things back to the swing that the makers had intended. The push and the pull. The vain attempt to escape gravity, if only for a moment.
There aren't as many swings on playgrounds these days. I'm sure this has a lot to do with the way that kids of all ages create potential lawsuits with them, and there isn't enough rubber padding in the world that could have saved me on that summer night when I last took flight. Not unlike the the frigate bird of the south seas, it wasn't the flying, it was the landing that caused all the trouble.