Ancient Playground Animals Day

 

A little over a year ago I had a dream where I needed to use the bathroom desperately but was in a very small park nestled into the winding suburban circles where I delivered the newspaper daily as a high school freshman. In the dream I was a full grown adult and my sense of wonderment at being back in this tiny park which I had not seen in 30 + years was undercut by my desperate need to relieve myself.

When I saw a toilet standing in the middle of the park, I was surprised. It wasn’t a port-a-potty or a bathroom - just a toilet. It’s presence was as factual and un-explained as the teeter-totter, the merry-go-round and the swingset. It was close to midnight and no one was in sight, so I went ahead and sat down to use it.

Before I was finished, I heard a group of high school students talking and laughing and walking through the neighborhood toward the park. It was only then that I realized that I had removed ALL of my clothes to sit on the toilet so I scrambled to dress before they arrived. I successfully got my shirt on, but not my pants. They swung on the swing for a moment and then went on their way. It didn’t seem like they had seen me at all.

Once they left, I pulled my pants on and the dream was over.

When I woke up and started to write down the dream, my morning wakeful self had every bit as much wonder as my dream-self had experienced.  

WHY IN THE WORLD did I end up in this park of all places?  

My family had moved out of Roosevelt Park as soon as I left for college so I had never been back.  We had arrived in this little enclave of split levels and ranches when I was a freshman - so it never really felt like I belonged. My parents enrolled me in a fundamentalist Chrsitian school and I never met any of the other adolescents who lived there.  I looked out the upstairs windows and watched them as they skateboarded and leaned on their ten speeds or shot hoops in their driveways.  

Sometimes I rode my ten speed alone through the streets like an alien who had been accidentally teleported to a colony of aliens who looked just like him and spoke the same language but at the same time couldn't understand anything about each other.  

By the time I was a senior in high school I had made friends at my school, but not in my neighborhood.  One weird summer night just a week before I left town for college,  I walked around the circle with them after dark.  We carried a boom box and ended up in that same little park all laying in the grass.  When the local pop radio played Hands to Heaven by Breathe we all started singing at the lyric about being back together someday.  We kept singing.  

I do realize that the idea of four eighteen year olds laying in the grass singing may seem stranger than my dream, but to me it just felt like I finally had found belonging and identity and meaning and the idea that I was saying goodbye to it was just so damn overwhelming. 

I did not, at that time, use the word "damn."  If eighteen year old me would read me writing it now, he'd be disappointed with me.  He might even sing to me all the lyrics from I Miss The Way by Michael W. Smith.  My eighteen year old self and Michael W Smith both had a really strong sense that sincerity, not irony was the way to get through in life. 

I haven't totally changed my mind about sincerity.  However, my affection for ironic distance has grown quite a bit. 

After I finished writing down the dream, I looked up the neighborhood using google surveillance satellites.   I hadn't been back since that night in 1988.  I played the Breathe song on youtube searching for the little park, and it was very hard to find.  In my memory, the park was exactly the width of one allotment, but two allotments deep. You could walk through the middle of the park and be on a completely different street with completely different neighbors.  It was a path you could ride your bike across if you had a friend on that other street.  (I didn't, but I still sometimes rode my bike through that park.)  Also if there were no little kids with attentive mothers since they didn't care much for teenagers riding bikes, and they would yell at you 

I couldn't find the park at all on google maps.  

This made me sad.  I realized that for some reason the city had decided to close the park and sell the lots.  Build houses, sell the merry go round.  More taxpayers on the rollss.

Then I forgot about all of it:  the dream, the teenage isolation, the park, the singing. 

I forgot all about it until I got sent an on errand during our Thanksgiving trip to visit Michigan and the errand meant that I drove right past my old paper route on Marlboro Road.  I drove around the circle we lived on and was SHOCKED to see that the park was still there.  It was exactly the same.  I strained to see where I had dreamed the toilet and I was so shocked to see an ancient metal playground animal in its place.  I didn't even remember that there were ancient playground animals there.  I parked the car and went out and took this picture and stored it in my drafts on instagram for a day when I would have time to rehearse this long tale.  

Two days ago an ancient playground purple seal (which I had discovered while visiting Fish Town in Philly) popped up on my four-years-ago timehop.   

Yesterday an ancient playground dolphin popped up from three years ago.  

Clearly today was Ancient Playground Animals Day -- so I wrote this mysterious story down, and then drove to the Serbian Orthodox Picnic Grounds at the edge of town and took new fresh pictures of my two favorite ancient playground animals there.  

If you want to send me an original birthday card next year, please just send a picture of the ancient playground animals near you and the mysterious circumstances that inevitably swirl round them.