Electronic Yahtzee

Day 219: Electronic Yahtzee

This little thing helped get us through
several 1,000 mile drives to St.
Augustine, back before iPhones

Milk crates. A few weeks ago, about three dozen of them appeared at my neighborhood playground. Black, lime green, red, yellow. The plastic kind that Calder Dairy delivers our milk in once a week. The kind you can buy at Target for $2.99.

I first noticed them because a group of older high school kids were using them to build a tower on the blacktop near the school's kindergarten wing. They were creating a pyramid form, trying to make it stable enough that one of the lighter girls could climb on the top. They would build it, then help her climb. Then it would collapse and they'd try again.

An older woman and I stopped to watch in horrified fascination. She was the kind of woman I hope to be in twenty years, with wrinkles you'd get when you've smiled a lot and a spry walk.

"That looks dangerous," I said.

"Yes," she replied. We paused, watching another collapse. Then she smiled. "But you can't worry about everything."

Every time I've walked past the playground since then, I've noticed the milk crates. They are never in the same place. Today, three boys had set up an obstacle course on the basketball court. They were timing themselves, zigzagging in and among the crates on their fat-tired bikes. Last week, some pre-schoolers were carrying up the play structure steps and pushing them down the slide, over and over. A week before that, some second graders were using them to supplement the jungle gym, stacking them against the walls. I've seen the crates on the swings, spread out on the lawn, stacked against the school wall and arranged in a baseball diamond. They are getting more use than the sandbox or the slides or the bocci court.

I keep waiting for the crates to disappear. Some administrator (someone like me, but who works for the school district) is going to realize that these crates are dangerous. Weak and wobbly. Uncontrolled and unstable. Somebody is going to hurt. There could be tragedy. There could be hell to pay.

We've got a builder's nook in the Gaffield Children's Garden, using all natural materials. The kids love it. Giant logs and long sticks, stones and sand. They build tiny little houses for trolls and fairies, and tipsy tipis to climb in themselves. There's nothing else like it anywhere in town - nothing like it in any other children's gardens I've seen around the country - and I love it. It reminds me of what playing was like when I was a little kid. My brother and sister and I would wander down to the little wetland on Hubbard and Green roads. We'd walk in the muck and pull cattails, separating the rusty sausage-like pods, rubbing the grainy seeds between our fingers and again the palms of our hands. There were pussy willows there; I remember stroking the downy buds against my cheek, careful not to damage the plant. Sometimes we'd wander in the woods behind the playground at our neighborhood park, watching for squirrels and chipmunks, listening to the birds, walking softly, pretending to be Indians.

Time stretched like caramel.