Jack and me and the playground

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 A decade or two ago I used to use my little fold up aluminium scooter a lot to whip around the inner city.  I relished the intimacy with the pavement, the different textures of the ground under me and the need to concentrate in case a big gap had me off and sprawling.  I loved the glides down slopes and the grace of sticking my leg out at the back like a ballerina as I flew along leaving  all the pedestrians behind.  It was so useful too. If I got more shopping than the handlebars could manage, I could fold it up, sling it on my back and hop on a bus with my bags.

I stopped using my scooter, not because I didn’t love it,  but because I found I needed a huge amount of good will and good temper to put up with the comments of truck drivers and others as they passed me.

“Good onya grandma” (and I wasn’t one then) “Gotta licence for that thing?” and so on.

  It puzzles me that people in their fifties, and indeed much older, can ride bicycles with quiet aplomb and yet if any one of them  gets on a scooter he or she immediately becomes a clown.  I now think it was weak willed of me to opt for dignity over the joy of my scooter and in fact have learnt better.

A while ago I bought Jack a little scooter from K Mart, however to begin with, it was not a huge success.  He gloated over it for a bit but lost interest when he couldn’t get it rolling along properly.

 Last Wednesday I decided to explore a new park with Jack. It was not very far away.  It had a fine slide and a little yellow loud hailer at toddler height.  Jack would like yelling through that, I thought.  The walk to the   park was along a main road and the thought of having to chase after a runaway Jack gave me pause.  Then I remembered seeing my old scooter in the attic.  With that I could catch him no matter how fast he ran, I thought a little maliciously. 

When Jack saw me with my scooter of course he wanted to take his too and I saw his point and agreed.  “Our horses,” I said  “Yours is Blackie and mine in Silver” and I gave a neigh for authenticity.  We set off for the park leading our mounts and attempting the odd awkward scoot. It was a bit uphill and Jack hadn’t got the hang of it.  Looking at him reminded me of the one and only time I had  ever been on skis – so boring when they didn’t move and so terrifying when they did.

One way and another we got to the playground – very inner city with a community garden alongside of it where corn waved and lush silver beet glistened.  Good on the Abercrombie Street people I thought .

The playground itself, though, was a puzzle.  There were a few desultory nods to early childhood – a sort of hen on a spring and the yellow loud hailer toy – but the central feature, the tall silver slippery dip was only accessible by what looked like army training equipment.  There were complicated rope loops and prickly chains, tenuous footholds and rungs far apart.  Jack and I contemplated all of this and I heaved him on to the lowest rung but he could get no higher and I couldn’t even get up that far.  At school I had always hung like a useless fruit on the end of the ropes in the gym, and things have certainly not improved since then.  I wondered who used this odd slide.  Those of an age and strength to tackle the assault course that led up to it would surely despise the childish passivity of sailing down to the ground on the silver chute.

Anyhow it was very frustrating for Jack and me.  We didn’t want to leave the playground without going on the slippery dip.  It was part of any playground visit.  Jack solved the problem in the end by trying to climb the chute itself.  He couldn’t do it because the sole of his sandals were leather and slipped.  I began to help and found my rubber soles clung nicely to the steel surface which was fairly tacky from lack of use.  Jack struggled to pull himself up with his arms as I shoved him from the back “Urgh, urgh, urgh” he grunted like a little grown up.  I didn’t grunt.  I sooled him on.

“Come on Jack.  We can do it.  We can climb Everest.  Nearly there.”

 I pushed his back and he heaved and my sandals blessedly stuck to the slide.  “If they don’t” I grimly thought “It’s one of those modern rubber surfaces underneath and we’ll probably survive a fall.”

But we got to the top and both of us were relieved and joyous.  The struggle made it seem all the higher.  The little cars on Abercrombie Street seemed far away and the branches of the gum trees  were  intimate and welcoming to us high people.

We availed ourselves of the slide down but it was a bit of an anticlimax with us stop starting all the way.  But Jack wanted to climb again and again and I wasn’t opposed to doing it.  I liked being the strong one and having him need my strength (and the traction of my sandal soles).

The sliding down improved with our repeated polishing and by about the fourth circuit my sandals wouldn’t stick any more so we had to give it away.

We were mellow on the way home and the lay of the land was in our favour with most of it being downhill.  Jack did his first tentative glide.  I showed off.  “Whee” I said and stuck my leg out like in the old days and then Jacob poked his out too.  I thought with great delight “He wants to be like me!”

Something nice had happened to us that morning.  Instead of beating me down with his terrible two power trips Jack had, yes, actually looked up to me and respected my expertise.

Was it only that I’d been appreciated that made me feel happy?  I don’t think so.  There was a relaxed collusion between Jack and me .  Both of us, at present, belong to the periphery of society.  He’s too young to be in the hurley burley of the mainstream world and I have opted for the freedom of retiring from it.  Nobody else has the time to play like we do and it’s a bond.

I’m going to go back to my scooter.  It’s  more than ten years since I gave up the pleasure of scootering and now I’m not wasting any more of my time.  I don’t think I mind about truck drivers any more.  I might call out when they jeer at me

“What’s your problem?  Get over it why don’t you. ”  It’s more or less what Jack would do.