see you at jonquil

Today, while trying to acclimate the kid to the out of doors (look it's not so bad, okay there's a few bugs, but for the most part it's not so bad, yeah, just ignore those drunk people...) we wandered near the park where I spent the formative years of my adolescence, Jonquil Park on Sheffield and Wrightwood near Lincoln ave.

As young kids, we ran wild through the streets and the park was our tree house, our back yard, our place. In the summers we spent every day there, playing tennis, volleyball, baseball or just playing on the playground. During the school year, we spent the afternoons there, weather permitting or not, until it got too cold. Even when it was cold, we just dragged ourselves to the park to meet up before walking around the neighborhood with shovels to make money shoveling sidewalks.

I get nostalgic every time I wander through that corner, every time I see those bronze birds on its corner (where my brother skate boarded and did stunts on roller blades) and every time I realize that piece by piece, the park and playground are being altered.

I suppose it's all a change for the better, but they got rid of the volleyball court and put in some dumb cement planters. They tore down the putty colored cement tables and chairs (we used to call them Flinstone furniture) that had chess boards carved or painted into them and replaced those with beige plastic tables and square seats with a metal plate of a chess board (the squares were green and blue for some unknown reason) bolted to the table on the corners (it will likely not last long under attack of bored teenagers, unlike the cement furniture which could not be destroyed by idle hands).

The worst offense was the playground, where a sprinkler had been set up (a sprinkler, really?) and it was too near the tire swing so the "safety first" flooring of the playground was slippery underfoot because of water from the sprinkler. And the swings were all wrong, in the wrong place. They used to be set parallel to sheffield and the park was an expanse in front of your feet, green grass, baseball diamond, the big wide open sky. Now they sit perpendicular so the view is big fancy redone homes and old shadowy trees.

Among the obvious delegated areas based on age, there is the playground set of the future! that looked like some science project of k'nex gone bad, with long sticks connected by bulbous rubber circles and weird shapes that required savvy studiousness expected of kids who no longer enjoy the playground because it's full of a bunch of babies. The colors are dark, the structure itself looks like some deconstructed space station, and I would love to see how little kids interact with this thing. Do they ignore it or dig the hell out of it? I bet they try in vain to figure out what the hell those shapes are meant for and fall every time from those weird triangles.

In the end, even though the park has changed, I found I could still enjoy it, I could still see it in my mind as it was, and in my mind it was this huge expanse, even though now it is small and simple and different.