MAY 11, 2023 – Today I accompanied our seven-year-old granddaughter to her three favorite playgrounds. I’d been to each before, but this time the energy level—hers, not mine—was higher than usual. As she climbed twisted ladders, hung upside down on elaborately arranged monkey bars, and zoomed down a long, two-stage, ground-based roller slide—“I’ll race you to the bottom, Grandpa!”—I was struck by the advances in playground design since I was . . . since ancient times.
Back then, our main playground was in the corner of the huge sandlot (shaded by a few big, old elms) behind Franklin Elementary. Atop a square of asphalt were a slide, a merry-go-round, a jungle gym, four swings, four teeter-totters, a set of parallel bars (one higher than the other), and a set of rings.
That playground was its own education center. The slide was a flash course in the conductive property of shiny steel. This lesson was particularly acute on sunny days in early fall and late spring, when you burned your butt on the way down—after having waited your turn on the infinity steps between the asphalt and the top of the slide. For me, the best part of the slide was the view from the top, but with kids behind you yelling, “Go! Go!” there wasn’t much time for scenery.
The merry-go-round could be pleasant enough in first and second grade—until older ruffians turned it into an instrument of terror. It was tilted so that one side was way off the asphalt and the other nearly scraped the ground. When the older bullies decided to scare younger riders by spinning the thing out of control, I learned to hang on for dear life—and for future reference, to jump clear when the bullies were anywhere close.
Another risky ride was the teeter-totter. The problem wasn’t the bullies. It was gravity. Inevitably, at some point in my teeter-totter career I found myself a mile high when the kid on the low end got distracted and impulsively jump off. BAM! and my butt hurt for the rest of recess.
But it was the rings that taught me all about emergency dental care. One day in third grade, I pulled an idiot maneuver and did a face plant on the asphalt. While I wailed away in the nurse’s office with my sixth-grade sister Elsa trying to comfort me, the school attempted to track down our mother, who was out and about. (Our dad was up at the cabin with our grandpa; they had no phone.) Eventually, the school succeeded and Mother took me off their hands and delivered me to Dr. Martin, who extracted what was left of my two front incisors. In due course he’d fit me with a partial, a “flipper,” with two false teeth attached to the front. With this unusual accessory I’d learn to entertain my classmates for years to come.
My parents took the school to task for having placed the playground equipment on asphalt, but by that time, of course, the horse was out of the barn. The principal argued stridently that kids stayed a lot cleaner on asphalt than they would in sand and mud—“especially when it was raining,” he added, just to drive the point home. That’s when I learned that the principal was an idiot.
The playgrounds that we visited today were equipped with state-of-the-art apparata, in each case, parked on a bed of wood chips or thick, spongy rubber. I had no fear that our granddaughter would fall and injure herself. In this regard, American is definitely greater today than it was in ancient times.
Iliana thought I’d do fine climbing up a slide. “It’s easy, Grandpa” she said. “You can do it.” I was sure too, but I was less sure about squeezing through the small opening at the top. My out was a nearby sign that read, “This playground is for children 5 to 12.” I brought this to Illiana’s attention, adding that I was considerably older than 12 and therefore, ineligible for the slide—in either direction. She conceded the point, allowing me to avoid humiliation—and possibly a petty misdemeanor charge—in the likely event that the fire department would have to be summoned to extricate me from the narrows at the top of the slide.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
