The Corona Diaries: Day Eighteen

“None of the usual sounds -- squeals of small children, shoots of water, thumping of basketballs -- were present.  It looked like everyone had gone home for good…”

If the silence of the streets is strange then the phasing out of the playground is prophetic. Things are getting worse. Perhaps they need to before they get better.

Days ago the playground was populated, if not fully, then at least by a few basketball players trying to keep their distance. Now we are in a new stage, from somewhat utilized to simply shuttered.

I wrote an essay about the passage of time at the playground several years ago…

Sprinkler

The toddler is off, fully clothed, racing into the sprinkler, while the mother yells, “No!” Clearly she came unprepared.

It is a balmy Sunday after Labor Day and the sprinklers in the playground, with their calming sounds, are usually off by now. Today is steamy, however, and perhaps the Parks Department has decided to give families one last sweet taste of summer. 

A few weekends ago, it looked completely different. The end of August was cool and grey and while walking the dog, I noticed the sprinkler was off, heralding the official end of the summer season. None of the usual sounds -- squeals of small children, shoots of water, thumping of basketballs -- were present.  It looked like everyone had gone home for good, shopping for back-to-school supplies, starting the endless process of preparing lunches and settling in for another academic year. My own children had grown up and left the house.

As a preschool teacher, I cannot say how many hours I have logged at the playground, with other people’s children. As a parent, I spent untold hours at this playground with my own children. When they were little, we were sometimes here twice a day, once in the morning, then after naptime. When my mother-in-law would drive up from Virginia, we would bring picnic lunches and sit at the chess tables. On one of these visits she commented that she was having a moment of déjà vu: ”Am I in Boston in the 1970s with my two small children, or am I in Brooklyn in the 1990s with my two small grandchildren?”

When they were older and in elementary school, we would sometimes go by the playground for a half hour on the way home. Then there was the day we stopped. We never went there again.

Exactly what day was that? Was it a Friday, or a Sunday? Was it in spring or summer? Was there a date? I could not possibly say because it wasn’t until years later that I noticed the lack of playground in our lives. It simply came and went, completely unnoticed. Yet, when I later realized that we had stopped going to the playground, it overwhelmed me. I could not stop thinking about it. I had to know. “When was it?” I asked the girls, who by now were in middle- and high school. I asked my husband. None of us could come up with an answer.

No one had prepared me for the last day on the playground. Would I have brought a cake? Or would I have prepared a speech for the girls: “Today is the last day we will come here. We will never come here to play again. Let’s really enjoy it today because it is not just another day at the playground. It’s our last one.”

We’ve talked about this repeatedly in my family since the day we discovered our loss. “I took Noah to the playground recently,” my younger daughter countered, referring to one of her babysitting charges. We looked at each other, immediately realizing that this simply did not count.

Soon the sprinkler will be off for the fall. The air will turn cooler and the children will start to wear their layers. Today, however, it is still late summer and typically humid. Parents push toddlers in tandem in swings that sing a whiny song. 

As I pass by with the dog, I am now an observer of other families at the playground, as sun rays filter through sparks of sprinkler water that squirt up into the late summer sky.