I walked past the local playground this morning and noticed something that set my Cranky Senior Citizen juices flowing. Loads of freshly-groomed sand sat beneath the sliding board and swings. We are molly-coddling our kids nowadays. First, it was car seats, then bicycle helmets, and now we're afraid that Tyler and Tiffany will skin their knees at the playground.
How are today's kids to experience the joy of soaring off the swings, skidding across asphalt paving, shredding their clothes, and picking chunks of gravel out of their bleeding brush burns? An asphalt-encrusted scab was the macho tattoo of yesteryear. Unlike the real tattoos that kids get today, it disappeared before age, gravity, and one-too-many beers caused it to sag embarrassingly.
The sand bed at the foot of the slide would slow down that final burst of speed that enabled us to run up the board and just barely reach the top. It was the defining mark of Big Kid Status to surmount the big sliding board. Today's mark of Big Kid Status is achieving mastery of "Grand Theft Auto".
Assuming they can tear themselves away from their video games, the "best and brightest" modern kids might scatter that sand at the bottom the slide on its surface and encourage their naive younger siblings to slide down a few times, polishing the surface for maximum speed before they take over. We would have done the same back in the day except it was a long walk to the Jersey shore for sand. We ingeniously lubricated the sliding board surface with a vigorous rub of waxed paper. Mom always wrapped out lunchtime sandwich in waxed paper, so using it on the slide was an early form of recycling.
Placing a sand cushion beneath playground equipment leads to kids getting tattoos, achieving status with video games instead of healthy exercise, and wasting our precious natural resources. Let's keep our playgrounds on asphalt where they belong.
No comments:
Post a Comment