Playground Extinctions

Well, despite my numerous rants about the state of the market, I have finally done it. We moved to a new home last week and are settling in. We left our old house in the hands of some nice dental students, and pray that they don’t indulge in recreational laughing gas or drilling things that they shouldn’t.

Last night, still inch-deep in moving dust and with used packing tape stuck in various places on our bodies, we finally took our first family stroll through the new neighborhood. It’s pretty standard — HOA pool, neatly spaced shrubbery. And, much to my toddler’s delight, a playground.

My husband and I sat staring at all the contraptions. Everything was neat, clean, padded (Did you know that they make rubber mulch now? No wonder there’s a youth obesity epidemic. Sitting on the ground isn’t even uncomfortable anymore), injury-resistant, idiot-proof.

The observation led my husband and me into a discussion about how much playgounds have changed since we were kids.

My elementary school recess zones were large, cleared areas of dirt packed so hard that errant baseballs wouldn’t leave dents in it. Rising up from it were pieces of “play equipment” that could have passed as castoffs from the MadMax or Bladerunner sets. Everything was metal, everthing was gray, and not a single surface was germproof.

Sean recalled his elementary school playground in rural Louisiana, where someone had endeavored to make a homespun version of one of those “fitness courses” that were so popular in the 80s. (Remember the ones? The school I attended in the fifth grade, and the yuppiest by far, had one. It featured instruction panels depicting a man in ungodly short shorts and a Bjorn Borg haircut doing squat thrusts by a lake.)

“Did it have those tires you were supposed to run through?” I asked him.

“No. It was kind of improvised. It did have this one station where someone had cut up an old telephone pole into different length, and they were all stuck into the ground in a circle. You were supposed to try and jump up onto the top of each one, I think.”

And I suppose that if you failed, you got an uppercut to the jaw and possible decapitation. Ah, the beloved battlefields where boys became men.

My personal favorite was the merry-go-round. And I’m not talking about the automatic thing with the pretty horses. No, this one was like a giant steel lazy susan/bone grinder. A foot-deep ditch surrounded it where, for decades, hundreds of kids hyped up on chocolate milk had grabbed the edges, run fast enough in a circle to nearly make the thing airborn, and then hopped on at the last minute for a glorious, vomit-inducing ride. That was recess. After that, whether or not we’d stay awake and pay attention through social studies was a moot point. Deep down, everyone felt lucky to be alive.

I haven’t seen one of those old school merry-go-rounds in a long time. I guess they’ve gone the way of the tug-of-war, into the great, nebulous black hole of the galaxy Someone Might Get Hurt. I know it’s for the best.

But part of me will always wonder how my son’s life would have been different if he’d known the thrill of a real slide. No, I don’t mean any kind made of slow-as-syrup plastic or curved into speed, hampering twists. I mean a 20-foot drop down dust-slicked aluminum, where you risked 3rd degree burns on the backs of your thighs at high noon.

Why do I look upon these things with nostalgia? I know I could have been killed. I know a few kids probably were and it isn’t funny. But it is sad to me when something that created a lot of memories for a lot of children for a lot of years ceases to be.

And in my mind, there’s a heaven for all those monoliths somewhere, shined up to museum quality next to the deathtrap hotrods of the 50s, right behind the rack of lawn darts.

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