Sunny days, chasing the clouds away

Teague Park, Longview - Photo by Justin Baker

Someone should start building playgrounds for grown-ups. Playgrounds the way we remember them from our own childhoods: swingsets sized for us, the monkey bars and jungle gyms and merry-go-rounds that have been torn out to make things safer for today's kids, who are apparently weak and frail compared to earlier generations. And once they're built, their use should be mandatory. Everyone could do with a day off to act like a kid again.

For my friends and I, that day was Friday. We brought lunch - a postmodern picnic-replacement picked up at a McDonald's on the way across town - and relaxed in the sun, throwing French fries at complacently overfed ducks who made a show of desultory pecking at the first few offerings, then ignored the rest. Everyone's a critic.

Having gotten the cold, feathery shoulder from the waterfowl, we went off on a grand adventure, hiking around the perimeter of the man-made fishing pond that dominates Teague Park and telling stories. On the far side of the pond, we noticed that there were two different playgrounds in the field across the carpark: a modern, "safe" plastic one, and that glory of glories, an old-school jungle gym with a swingset and a climbing tower and a fireman's pole and a metal slide.

We frolicked on it, running up the slide and skinning our palms on the pole and competing with each other over who could make the most dramatic death speech before throwing themselves down the slide (thankfully, it was only about 80 outside, with decent cloud cover, so the sun hadn't heated the slide up to griddle temperature yet - possibly the only advantage the modern all-singing, all-dancing, all-plastic playground equipment has over the originals). When some actual (chronological, rather than mental) children arrived, we left so as not to cramp their style.

We hit up the toy department of a dollar store on our way to another park on the north side of town, and spent the rest of the afternoon blowing bubbles and failing to fly a kite. A robin red-breast kept up a very loud commentary on our activities, deriding our kite failure and warning us when we ran too close to the overhead power lines, and when he called it a night, so did we.

The engineer of the group is already planning ways to improve on our dollar-store kite for next week's visit, and we plan to keep up this childish exercise routine as often as possible until the spring turns to summer and we have to stay inside with the air conditioning for our own good.

This Is Ivy League - Richest Kids In Town (myspace)
The Lucksmiths - Up With The Sun (website)
The Explorers Club - Don't Forget The Sun (website)