Harmony Playground Scenes

About a week ago we were at the sandbox when suddenly a very small boy started to cry. He had somehow gotten a bleeding gash over his left eyebrow and began looking around for his nanny, who had walked away for some reason.

Other adults were trying to help him. A young svelte asian woman stepped towards him with outstretched arms, but he moved back in fear, and she backed away. Then a white woman with sunglasses who was sitting on the edge of the sandbox reached out to comfort him, and once again he backed away, but this woman was not going to be put off. She didn't say anything but somehow the air was filled with her decision to claim this child in anguish and resolve his trouble. He was such a tiny little guy, in jeans and a plaid button down shirt, blonde bowl cut, bleeding wound.

The woman picked him up and still crying he went with it, and in seconds he was in the arms of his concerned nanny who stood at the baby slide nearby, perhaps with a younger child.

This kind of thing happens, there's a lot of tension that comes from the possibility of harm and abandonment within such a large space. My son usually plays on the jungle gym for the big kids paying absolutely no attention to me, and the other day when I was across the playground pushing my daughter in the baby swings, a stranger showed up with my son, in tears, convinced that I had left the park without him. Well, I hope it is very clear now that I would never do that.

It was nice to see the concern and empathy that the adults had, and they aren't the only ones. My friends children swarm around her youngest child, age 2, like guardian angels. The day the boy got cut I also saw an adult woman full on playing with a group of kids, who were loving it and giving off that certain radiance that kids get when their adults cross that border of adulthood and travel back into kid land. I wondered if she was a babysitter or tutor, this young hispanic woman who sped past me on a skateboard a couple times, followed by a flock of about half a dozen kids of various races with enormous grins on their faces. The hills are alive...