Geiger Counter

Trampoline in a corn field   We sat in a friend’s farmhouse this winter, eating dinner and commiserating about life, weeping and gnashing our teeth, as is so fashionable these days. My heart is rarely in it, this ubiquitous complaining that we all do, because its source is the conviction that we all deserve to live in perfect health in a perfect world, forever and ever. But complaining is so ingrained in our society that it is often my default conversational tactic; lazily listing the many ways I feel the world is not pulling its weight, not doing enough for me. My daughter doesn’t clean up her messes. Too many foods have corn syrup in them. Whoever I vote for in the presidential primary always comes in last and is never heard from again. My knees hurt. Movies are all remakes.  Near the end of the evening, far later than small children are supposed to be up, the kids came to us and asked: “Can we go outside and jump on the trampoline?” They went out and started leaping on the big trampoline in the backyard. The night was black and cold, and through its infinities plummeted big, white flakes of snow, so large you could feel the imminently wet impact of each as it struck your cheek. After several hours spent griping about school and work and lack of sleep and bills, we stood in sudden awe as our girls bounced in the cold, dark void, steam rising from their forms as their hair tried, and always failed, to catch up with the rhythm of their ascending and descending bodies. They shrieked and squealed and laughed in the night.  “Wow,” said my friend, gazing at her daughters as if seeing them for the first time.  “Yeah,” I replied, looking at mine. “All things are not equal.” “Yeah.” All of our grievances suddenly seemed like they had taken place on a stage, an artificially warm, brightly lit façade where we did what society told us was normal; complain about our children and our lives, and the small inconveniences inexorably bound to both. The Wisconsin night was its total opposite. Frigid. Dark. Real. And there, they squealed and giggled and yelled into the uncaring sky while their caring parents looked on, stunned by the immensity of the moment and the triviality of all we had groused about mere moments earlier.  For some reason, I was surprised to learn the trampoline was invented. Pretty recently, actually. I thought it had always just existed, I guess, in one form or another – or that its provenance was so long ago that, like the wheel’s, it would remain an eternal mystery. The trampoline was invented by an Iowa man named George Nissen. As a teenager in 1930, he went to a circus, where he marveled at the way the aerialists fell from great heights into a bouncy net, which absorbed the violence of their fall and ushered them gently upward again. Fifteen years later, Nissen patented his tumbling device, which borrowed its “trampoline” moniker from the Spanish word for diving board.   Our daughter has asked many times for her own trampoline. We always say no. In my mind, they are chiefly widow makers, responsible for more deaths annually than cars and consumption and tigers put together. Whenever I imagine us bringing home a trampoline, I imagine my own figurative fall, more than any literal rising. I imagine bludgeoning and cutting my fingers during an assembly process that tests the fortitude of the very fabric of my marriage. I then envision all the neighborhood kids coming over to bounce on it, each one being flung into nearby shrubs and the lofty crotches of maple trees, or possibly into the very stratosphere itself. Then I imagine myself in court, trying to explain that I did not intend to maim all the neighborhood children, I merely facilitated the whole thing.  And most likely, if we had regular access to a trampoline, our daughter would lose interest anyway. That is the inverse relationship we have with things. We want the things we do not have, while the things in front of us always just seem so “meh.” If we owned a trampoline, our daughter might jump on it for a few days, then it would fall into disuse, covered in white, chalky bird droppings and eventually sat on by teenagers who would talk in hushed voices about secret parties and leave behind mysterious burn marks on the fabric that, like the skin of an aging parent, had lost much of its luster, and much of its elasticity.  I was driving home from the store today when I looked to my right, into a sweeping cornfield. The land, swollen with late winter rain, was covered with the pale beige stubble of last year’s crop. In the middle of the field, faded and tattered by time, but still very much intact, was a massive trampoline. It seemed out of place, a recreational toy born at a circus, somehow transported by a wormhole of happenstance into a no-nonsense agricultural setting. It was on its side and clearly no longer in use, and I wondered at its origins. Certainly, at some point little children had leaped and squealed in delight as it flung them into the air. I suddenly remembered the feeling in my gut when I jumped on a trampoline as a child, like flying, like you were about to reach out and give God a high-five or punch Him in the face, depending on your personal theology. I wondered where those children are now, the ones whose old trampoline now sits in a cornfield in southern Wisconsin, its springs turned umber with rust, its fabric no longer tested by little feet. How did it get here? Where did they go?  I didn’t stop and take a picture. I didn’t think to snap one that night, a few months earlier, either, when my daughter bounced and laughed. But both images are forever in my mind. I will soon forget why I needed to go to the store today, or what, exactly, we complained about in the farmhouse that night. But I will never forget my daughter, seven years old,  temporarily freed from gravity’s mundane and greedy claws, her curly hair racing to catch up, on a dark, cold night, as big snowflakes fell, falling and rising, again and again. More of life is spent complaining than marveling. That’s just the nature of it. But I am already forgetting what, exactly, we complained about that night. That night is the trampoline night, and all else is peripheral. Some moments, very small ones, are much bigger than others. Most of the things we see and feel are soon washed away, obliterated by their own entropy. And the importance of things is not defined by their largeness, or their length.  Because all things are not equal, and some brief moments loom large for the duration of our stay.