Playgrounds

Growing up, I used to go over to the playground at Sawyer School, a few blocks from our house.  I remember it as huge with monkey bars, merry-go-round and a slide attached to something we called a toboggan run.  All of it was an invitation to serious injury.

Lose your footing on the monkey bars, and you could hit your head hit multiple times on the way down to the ground, which had stones everywhere.  Get dizzy on the merry-go-round, and you might lose your grip and fall off; if you were standing and running on the inside in that open area between the seat and the axle in order to make things go round, you could hit the dirt and then get hit in the head by the metal piping passing overhead.  As for that slide, let me just say that it was attached to this oblong wooden structure (think a long right triangle on its side) that had to be 25-30 tall at the top.  From there you climbed up the slide, putting you 30-35 feet above ground.  The place was triage waiting to happen.

I’m not sorry Clare never got to experience that kind of playground; I really do think there are emergency-room records buried away that would make a person gasp to read.  Twenty years ago, when our daughter was at her playground peak, everything had turned to soft surfaces and gentle climbing.  Clare being Clare, she wanted more of a challenge, so I would take her to this thing where you grabbed an overhead bar to move eight feet or so from Point A to Point B.  We turned that into an Olympic event.  Then there was Willie the Whale.

Willie is a piece of granite or marble, I’m not sure which, sculpted into the form of a whale.  Better yet, there’s a sprinkler for a blow hole.  I cannot tell you the joy produced by running—or watching a child run—through that sprinkler.

We left Willie behind in Oak Park when we moved to Berwyn, but Clare dealt with the loss OK because we had a playground at the end of the block, all swings and bridges.  The playground may have made all the difference in our parenting; I dread to think of what we would’ve had to do otherwise to tire out the child of perpetual motion we had.  I feel sorry now for those parents around here with their own versions of Clare.

The city of Berwyn, in its infinite wisdom, is turning the playground into a parking lot for some new fast food places that have gone up.  Off in Oak Park, Willie the Whale sheds a tear.