When I Stop to Think Again: At the Park

It is a beautiful summer day. A light wind rustles through the trees in its futile attempt to try to convince me that it is still spring. I am strolling through the park of my youth. I spent so many hours here playing - so many memories of my childhood happened here and I am flooded with nostalgia. Today, the playground is teeming with small kids and the women who love them. Some would call the park tranquil - those people would be wrong as the screaming of the kids is pervasive (or maybe it is all relative and they lead ridiculously loud and hectic lives) . I sit down against a tree and lean back and try to get back in touch with what I have left behind. I scan my surroundings and a wry grin flashes across my face as I think.....

I think about the sand in the sandbox. Always being shaped into walls and crammed into buckets to make castles. So useful in the building of civic sand structures and all it wants to do is dance!

I think about the skinny trees with the drooping branches that kid after kid has hoisted themselves up on. The step-ladder of nature, a route to the top. The once-strong branches hang low to the ground, bent and almost broken. I know it has had a hard life, but it could have been turned into paper, so it should quit whining or I'll call my friend at the mill.

I think about the slide. So smooth, so shiny, so metallic. So unlike my aunt in at least two ways that come to mind.

I think about the monkey bars almost daring me to swing on them. I imagine them to be friends, or at least it makes me feel better if they are friends. Now I start to wonder if they are and it makes me sad.

I think about the bushes near the old clubhouse. A hideout for kids and an outhouse for dogs and often times vice versa. What has it done to deserve this?  When I walk past it, I swear I heard it whisper "please take me with you!"

I think about the old basketball hoop with the tattered net. This once proud statue has seen many a game, a contest, a battle. Tears of anguish were shed by the losers and cheers of rejoice by the winners. This majestic beacon has watched it all and is the sum of all of these grand experiences. How must it feel now as a dog urinates on it?

I think about the water fountain. I wonder if it misses the other, more elaborate ornate fountains it grew up with and hung out with at the fountain factory. While others were constructed with the finest of materials, I'm sure he endured much teasing and bullying over being so thick and concrete. And yet, he lives his life as the focal point of the park, the hub where all people gather. Whenever he remembers the name calling of his youth he just reminds himself that he is now the dispenser of the fluid of life. The years of therapy were worth it.

I think about the swing and I am sure that she is the envy of all the other equipment at the playground. Soaring into the sky, almost touching the branches of the tree, nearly flying away from it all. Everything else must see the swing as a footloose-and-fancy-free type character who is cutely oblivious to how inadequate it makes everyone else feel.

I sit on the grass on the hill. How tough it must be to band together as one! How does the greener grass on top convince the slightly shriveled and browner blades on the periphery to work together towards a common goal and become much more than the sum of its parts? Can one renegade group of grass take down the whole group? Do they all wish they led a more interesting existence like their cousins wheat and alfalfa?

I toss a shiny rock up in the air and clasp it in my hand. This is an oddly satisfying experience, except that I am fairly intimidated by its smoothness and how rubbing it and perversely enjoying the lack of imperfections reminds me of how much my back resembles the surface of the moon. 

I think about the small wading pool filled with laughing little kids and crying littler kids. I vividly remember the obscenely criminal coldness of the water. As a child I spent hours in that pool without a care in the world. I throw caution to the wind and jump in - I am recapturing my youth and I have never felt more alive nor more totally and completely numb. I can hear the pool saying "look at you with your walking and talking and ability to love, well I can make your lips turn blue and your teeth chatter - booyah!"

I think about the bench I am sitting on. All of these years together, me and the bench and I just feel so badly about how one-sided the relationship has become. I wish somehow, just once, that he could sit on me.

The rings call out to me. I look around just to make sure they are talking to me. "Come swing on us." It is a tempting proposition and I almost give in to their siren song, and then I remember what my grandfather cryptically said to me as he clipped his toenails on my 9th birthday  "never trust the rings - at first you'll just do one ring, then it will become two and the next thing you know it will be 'ring this' and 'ring that' and only a steady dose of a month of the seesaw will cure you."

I have a sneaking suspicion that I am being watched. I turn around quickly and there is no one there. No one, except for the soccer goal post. That annoying goal post acts like the judge, jury and executioner at the park. Seasons come, seasons go, and it just stands there, making me deal with my flaws one missed shot on goal at a time. I guarantee he has no real friends.

I think about the tire swing and all of the times I wish we could trade places. He'd have the nose bleeds, the rare Ancient Greek complexes, the imaginary girlfriends who always ran away to become international models and I'd be the round mound of swingtastic fun.

I think about the small, baby pine cones on the pine tree. Though now they are small, one day they may grow to become large pine cones. It's all a big scam and we all know it. They think they will be pine trees some day, but it's all a lie and we are all complicit. They are on a one way trip to nowheres-ville. Just like my aunt Frenchie.

What would my life be like if I became a fence? I could no longer play the "race" card as it would make absolutely no sense at all. Come to think of it, all card playing would most likely have to cease as would using scrapbooking techniques to make amazing invitations - mostly due to the lack of hands, but also because can you imagine a boring old fence being creative enough to design a card?1?!? Fences seem so conservative and a bit annoyed at being climbed on all the time. At best, they are like large arms hugging the park and keeping everything safe and warm and at worse, they are instruments of "the man" trying to oppress us all. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

I think about the abandoned young toddler's shoe. How it must feel? Does it miss it's twin? Did the foot complete it? Will it still be here in a few thousand years as sole proof that humanity once trod here? Will the aliens think we were one-legged beings with a sole tiny foot? Or possibly they will think that we were a race of gigantic shoe-like creatures with this being a fossilized baby?

I think about the dandelions. Not too sure what to think about them except how beautiful they are and how we should all pray before them and repeat after them "all hail our new leaders, our saviours, our  Gods in flowery weed form". What was I saying? I sort of dazed off for a second...oh yeah, dandelions... I think I read somewhere that dandelions may look innocent but there is a myth that they are exceptionally good at hypnosis and mind control and selling insurance.