45 Minutes in a Hammock

My brother Jack, a sports-psychology professor at Indiana, is chock full of interesting stories about elite athletes.  He also has a bit of an obsession with zombies, but that is another story.  One of the most interesting things he has researched is what happens to time when an elite athlete is competing. Apparently, time slows waaaay down for these special athletes, allowing the baseball player to see the pitched ball in slow motion or the swimmer to see the wall in great detail.

I am fascinated by the idea of changing the feel of time.  But I am hardly an elite athlete, so I have to find other ways to make time feel different.

That's why I spent 45 minutes in a hammock yesterday. You remember yesterday--that quintessential October afternoon when the sky was deep blue and the breeze was still warm with the breath of late summer.

Supine and looking skyward (when I wasn't nodding off), with Finn at my feet, I rocked my way into an alternate universe, one in which the air was sweet and my mind could not for the life of it remember if I was 9 or 53.  There, with a wall of reddening Boston Ivy on my side, I watched life pass me by--buzzed by a low-flying flock of red-winged blackbirds; tickled by handfuls of yellow locust leaves; dizzied by the wormy paramecium swimming their way across my eyeballs.

Set against the fuzzy soundtrack of neighbor kids playing up the street, I found myself transported to a cool summer day in the '70s, my toes testing the chilly waters at East Hills Swimming Pool.  There, beneath the strange, gangly arms of my neighbor's wisteria, I wondered and wandered my way through seasons and years and strange half dreams, my feet literally not touching the ground.

It was a time warp of Rocky Horror proportions, only woozy and wonderful.

I will never be an elite athlete.  I will never see the stitched seams of a baseball as it whirrs its way towards me.  But I can make time slow down, right there in a hammock in a back yard on Woods Avenue, with my mind opened to the possibilities of what was and what might be.  And I'd recommend it to anyone with a little time on her hands and a hankering to change the feel of that time as it slips through her fingers.

Time on a hammock is always time well spent.