"For the Slip’N Slide" by George Bilgere (by Nin Andrews)

I keep trying to figure out how we arrived here, and what country and planet we are now living in/on. When did this all begin? I grew up in the 60's in the midst of massive social change with integration and women's liberation and the Vietnam War protests and Martin Luther King and JFK and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Ram Dass and Timothy Leary.  It was the Age of Aquarius, of peace and love and expanded consciousness. It was also the beginning of the end of the New Deal Republicans.   I remember Barry Goldwater, whom my parents described as a political outlier with his extremely conservative and libertarian agenda and his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of
1964  . . .  

I love this poem that takes me back to the 60's.

For the Slip’N Slide
by George Bilgere


For the WHAM-O Manufacturing Company
which in 1961 invented the Slip’N Slide.
For Brenda Harris’s shady back yard
with its long fairway of soft grass where she
and her sister whose name is now lost
set up the Slip’N Slide and attached it to the hose
under the burning summer sky of East LA.
How Brenda and her sister and I ran
in our swimsuits, took a flying leap, and skidded,
screaming bloody murder on our tummies.
How we did this ten thousand times, howling
our Tarzan cries and never tiring of it. For Brenda,
who invented the Double Decker, whereby
the two of us would run, Brenda just behind me,
and I would belly flop onto my stomach
and she would land on my back and we streaked
across the yard out of control and smashed
into her mother’s hydrangeas. For her mother,
who didn’t get mad.  Who at lunch time put out
a pitcher of iced lemonade or Kool-Aid
and a bunch of Velveeta and Wonder Bread sandwiches
on the table under its green umbrella and we kids
sat there eating like royalty. How nothing
was better than those Wonder Bread sandwiches.
For the Safeway supermarket down the road,
which employed Brenda’s father in the produce department,
where he earned the salary that paid for the Slip’N Slide.
How he would fill a couple of shopping bags
with day-old lettuce and carrots and oranges
and onions and radishes and potatoes
destined for the dumpster behind the Safeway
and leave them on the front porch of our house
where my mother would find them when she got home
from her job as a guard at Fontana Women’s Prison,
the only work she could find after my father died
of booze and left her with the three kids
and a falling apart little stucco house. How
accepting the day-old produce hurt her
even more than working at the women’s prison
and collecting food stamps because in her former life
as socialite wife of a well-to-do drunk
she had employed people like Brenda’s father,
who entered from the back door when they came to work.
For the women incarcerated in Fontana Women’s Prison,
whose crimes, whatever they were, gave my mother a job.
How she never thanked him. For that summer
under the cobalt LA sky, where a place
called Watts had yet to ignite, and our Tarzan cries
echoed in the yard and the cold lemonade
made our heads ache and the days went on
forever, the Slip’N Slide like an endless river
which arrived one day at a fork which none of us
could see coming, and Brenda and her sister,
her mother and her father drifted off
into a place called African America,
and my mother and sisters and I drifted off
into something called gated communities,
the Slip’N Slide, the Wonder Bread sandwiches,
the bags of groceries long forgotten.
For Brenda, and the Double Decker that summer
a lifetime ago, and how the two of us now
keep on journeying deeper and deeper
into a country growing stranger,
less recognizable, more lonely every day.

Comments

[Grace Cavalieri]

Thank you, George and Nin, for this poem--we felt safe then in our modest lives, but that I am in the same world with George and Nin is all I need for this day. I am safe.

[Kyril Alexander Calsoyas]

If the edifice is shifting, uncertain, and forbidding, look to the unredressed problems with its foundation. Spiritual and emotional wellbeing built on the suffering of others, slaves and Natives, is unlikely to bring any real peace particularly if the edifice continues to be propped up by the suffering of others within and without the edifice. On the other hand, one might simply look at the frisbee and those halcyon days as precursors of the deadly drone and advanced defense AI and fully accept Heraclitus's thought borne out by our history as a nation, "It is necessary to understand that war is common, strife is customary, and all things happen because of strife and necessity."

[Sally Bliumis-Dunn]

Thank you for this, Nin. George captures an entire emotionally and socio-economically complex world in this poem. My equivalent of the Sip'N Slide was riding bikes all day around and around a Florida neighborhood nad collecting bottles on construction sites to save up for candy at Seven 11, my neighbor's mom offered those same velveeta sandwiches for our bike gang!

[Terence Winch]

Beautiful poem. George is a brilliant poet.

[Carol Guerrero-Murphy]

That George and his friend Brenda didn't see the worlds that divided them is moving and rare.
What a fine poem, one of the best examples of "showing" vs. explaining, say, in this case how his family had fallen from middle-class white America which gave him the gift of friendship across color. As far as I can remember back in Anchorage, a few years earlier than George's memory, I saw the displaced Alaska native villagers in our little city as different and often mysteriously suffering. I envy this speaker his time with that loving family.

George's daily poems keep me going every morning. So many thank.

[Robin Becker]

Wonderful, evocative poem. Thanks vey much for sharing it.

[Wendy Winn]

How I wish George's mother had swallowed her pride and thanked Brenda's father - what a lovely thing for him to have done. I would say that would have taught him gratefulness and humbleness, but he learned empathy and kindness and developed great sensitivity on his own, or perhaps partly through living with so many things left unsaid by the adults in his life. I think living with so much subtext helps shapes writers and nudged them (or hurls them down the Slip 'n Slide) to try to express their feelings about it and make sense of their world and the world at large too. It's beautiful that in this poem, we get the innocence of children, and hints of the pervasive attitudes that helped fork that river and cause division. My kids, growing up in Europe, had a version of the Slip 'n slide at school events in the late 90s and early 2000's - it brought back happy memories, as did this poem!

[Ron Lauderbach]

Another wonderful poem which uses an iconic American toy to lead us into a beautiful scenario that highlights children’s color blindness and basic human compassion.

[Susan Aizenberg]

Love this. Thanks, Nin Andrews & George Bilgere.

[Shutta Crum]

Love this poem. A vivid slice of life--well remembered.

[Michael Pantano]

Much like Phil Levine, Bilgere’s poems score the underbelly of Americana, yet his voice is uniquely his own. Love this poem, love Bilgere’s poems.