Free Knots in My Yo-Yo String by Jerry Spinelli

another kind of thrill? Some days I must have pedaled past Dovie Wilmoth’s house on Haws Avenue ten times, hoping that the beautiful platinum blonde would be on the front porch. If she was, I waved and called “Hi, Dovie!” and kept circling the block. Every three minutes: “Hi, Dovie!” She always smiled and waved back.
    When I was thirteen, I was old enough to leave town. My Roadmaster took me as far as Valley Forge National Historical Park, about five miles away. I crossed the Schuylkill on the singing bridge, so called for the sound of tires on the steel grate deck. You could see through the deck to the river below. For hours I rode the winding hills past cannon muzzles and monuments and replicated log cabins. Once, I parked mybike and walked into a hillside meadow to lie back and get some sun. When I opened my eyes, hawks were circling overhead. Not trusting them to know I wasn’t dead, I got out of there fast.
    Sometimes if my planned route for the day took me across the tracks at the dead end, I had to wait for a freight train to pass. I never felt thwarted or impatient about this. In fact, the longer the train the better, and if there were three or four engines, I knew it would be a very long one. By the end of junior high the steam locomotives had given way to diesels. The diesels were neither as terrifying at night nor as exciting in daylight, nor did they leave me with a headful of coal grit.
    As the train went by, I counted the cars: boxcars, tankers, flatcars, coal hoppers. By the time the caboose came clicking by, the engines were out of sight and earshot, out beyond the park band shell. I loved the caboose. I was surprised that no one was ever standing at the back rail, coffee mug in hand, watching the world go by.
    In those days I was many whats. A kid can be that. Grownups have gone ahead and answered the question: “
What
shall I be?” They have tossed out all the whats that don’t fit and have become just one. Teacher. Truckdriver. Businessperson. But a kid is still becoming. And I, as a kid alone, was free to be just about anything.
    So many careers came and went through me: salamander finder, crawfish annoyer, flat-stone creek skipper,cedar chest smeller, railroad car counter, tin can stomper, milkweed blower, mulberry picker, snowball smoother, paper bag popper, steel rail walker, box turtle toucher, dark-sky watcher, best-part saver. They didn’t last long, these careers of mine, but flashed into and out of existence like mayflies. But while they employed me, I gave them an honest minute’s work and was paid in the satisfactions of curiosity met and a job well done.
    When I went roaming by myself on foot or bike, I discovered more than water spiders and foreign neighborhoods. I discovered myself. By myself, not boxed in by rules of play, I was free to think, to wonder, to swoon.
    That’s what I did sometimes: I swooned, just thinking about things. Like time. Like space. I tried to imagine, tried to grasp the speed of light. One hundred eighty-six thousand miles per
second!
And how about those stars up there? The ones I saw when the sky turned the color of my dungarees. I had heard that these were only the closest ones, visible from earth. I had heard that there were billions and billions more too far away to see, that they went on and on and on until the end of the universe. I tried to imagine zooming out past the last stars and looking around—at what? What does the end of the universe look like? And what about time? What about
before
time?
    Thoughts like these did not come to mind as I flipped baseball cards with Spider Sukoloski or playedstreet football with Jerry Fox or gunslingers with Johnny Seeton. They presented themselves behind closed eyes on hillside meadows and during the long lazy wait for a box turtle to cross the path. The questions were as elusive as the answers, as delicate as a dragonfly’s wing. They gave me goosebumps. They made me dizzy. I swooned in my sneakers.

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