Even as a kid it was a question of Death, or action, motion, speed. On the swing-set, flying high, like later, running. Swinging for life, more life, another century of life.
I sang:
“I’m gonna live to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!
I’m gonna live be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!
I’m gonna live to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!”
Could Death so terrorize a seven-year-old to obsession, to the extremes of ritual and incantation?
I was the youngest at the picnic, seven years closer to Nothing than the adult picnickers, all in their twenties and thirties — too far from Emerged-From-Nothing to remember. And even further – most believed – from Forever-After to be awed by the Nothing eternally to come.
I chimed my ditty (prayer?), swinging rhythmically with metronome precision, fifty forward, fifty back:
“I’m going to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!
I’m going to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!
I’m going to be a-hundred-and-seven-years-old!”
Pendulous. Hypnotic. Doomed.