Imaginations Of The Playground

Four kids played loudly out at the neighborhood playground. The one that sits in the cement lot behind the school, dedicated to a 10-year-old boy who must have tragically passed in 1990. These kids played their version of "House". The game that glamorizes adult-hood to pre-teen eyes. Each part of the playground was an aspect of the house. The mom requisitioned the slide set-up as her "room" of the house. The eldest girl, who decided, after much consideration, that her name was Trinity, had partitioned off the exoskeleton, shell-shaped jungle gym as her room.

The scene they re-enacted set-up like typical picket-fenced, suburbia magic. The mom and other daughter tended to the mundane tidying of the AM in their room, while, for her birthday, the dad (and only male in the troupe lest you impart a reverse Victorian scenario) had gotten Trinity a bike. He brought her over to it, stashed in the "living room" that typically was the picnic-tabled habitat of the warm afternoon school lunches of spring, fall and summer. He covered her eyes and she acted surprised while the mom and daughter shouted accolades and then other suggestions for better playing out the scene. Eventually, it all sadly broke down when Trinity folded back to her real-life persona, took her actual bike and sped off over a disagreement with the "mother".

I am left to wonder and ponder, standing in the dull brown wood chips, this modal imagination. Where the jungle gyms and slides and monkey bars and swings are merely appendices to a house where kids can enact the boring events of adult-hood. Not that giving your child a bike is a banal gesture -- in fact, I imagine, a great opposite.