Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Sunday in the Park: Family Artifacts
Nearly fifty years ago, after classes, I would pick up my little girl from university day care and we would go to Lake Park. It is a famous park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, full of walkways and paths and hidden waterfalls.
The playground then was rudimentary. There were swings, a jungle jim, and a few slides. Everything was metal and too high. It was before we decided climbing safe things over cushioned flooring is wiser than swinging wildly over gravel. We didn’t know enough then to worry much. While kids climbed to the top of the jungle jim, their parents sat at the picnic tables and smoked cigarettes. I smoked Benson and Hedges Lights.
I pushed my little girl on the swings. It was the most peaceful thing I did during that time. The most normal. I wanted the stop at the playground after my classes and day care to be the caring, motherly thing I did before going home and making meat loaf for the two of us. What would a good family do? I asked myself. That’s what I wanted to do.
Then, later, when I remarried, we took more kids to the park. And then the park was redesigned and rebuilt, and we bought a brick to support the renovation but mostly to make a statement that we had been there, that I had been there with my little girl years before trying to do the things that a good family would do.
And today, while we were with our granddaughter at the newest playground (several playgrounds after the first one), I wandered over to visit our brick. It is still there. Testifying.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
wonderful brick for all that it symbolizes. I really understand this post, as I suddenly found myself a single mother without much money , going to school and working, and trying my darnedest to be a good mom.