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.

Jack and the band

I babysit Jack on Wednesdays so his mother can go to her Pilates.  He turned two recently and it’s as if he knows it’s time to turn terrible.

A negativity has installed itself in his vocabulary.  He says “No” to all offers of food or entertainment.  He doesn’t always mean it and often returns to get what he has just spurned on principle – apple, blueberries (his favourite), a walk.  Only a couple of weeks ago he used to say ”OK’  in a nice little voice and flow with the tide of what was going on.  Now it’s “No” or even more cuttingly “No thank you.”  His parents have taught him manners.

I suppose it’s power.  Saying no changes things.  It blocks the flow of another’s intentions so they have to go round about “Apple?” “No” “Grapes?” “No” “Nice meat?” “No”

Like minions we scurry around his iron will.  But he looks sad in his potentate role, “No” does not seem to be as much fun as “Yes.”

And our walk this Wednesday was a torment to both of us.  “No” got translated into turning around, going the wrong way, flopping in a dead heap when pressured to conform to my wishes.    He cried and let his shoulders go limp so there was no leverage for me to hoik him up.  His face was clouded in moodiness.

All our precious little intimacies now seem to have been cast aside. “Kiss?” “No”

“Cuddle?” No.”

The high five that all babies seem to be taught to do these days has turned to a nasty thwack and has had to be stopped.

He has got so strong and at sixty eight I am not quite  as strong as I was.  Tucking the flailing child under my arm strains every sinew.  I can still talk the talk but it won’t be long before I’ll be unable to walk the walk and implement my threats.  He’s just getting too big.

I put at least some of it down to play school which he has begun attending  twice a week.  It’s supposed to help him develop his social skills as well as give his mum time to do her own stuff.  Only this week I bought a little scooter for Jack, hoping to delight and intrigue him and who knows, keep him on track on our walks.  Fat chance!

“MY scooter.  MINE!” he crowed like something out of Lord of the Rings.  He hangs on to the thing as though hordes of barbarians are eyeing it instead of one bemused grandmother.

Not so long ago he was such a gentle soul.  We couldn’t find his dummy one nap time and he said, to my amazement, as we climbed our steep wooden stairs hand in hand

“Dummy all gone.  Never mind. Not your fault.”

Of course he was parroting  his gentle mother, but ah, how nice.  My grandson is going to be a saint perhaps, I muse.

Not so now.  Beelzebub could not shoot more sulphurous looks than Jack when crossed.  There’s a sideways angle of his head, which adds scorn to the mixture of rage and outrage.  It cows me a bit.

Sometimes he just seems angry and even “No” is not enough.  He needs violence.  Two weeks ago we’d had a pretty turbulent morning’s shopping in the Broadway Centre.  A fight over getting into the supermarket trolley and another one about getting out.  A horrible moment when he’d managed to move the pushchair with his feet whilst still strapped in. I'd been concentrating on typing in my pin number. I needed a coffee and he was not, for once, oppositional about warm milk with a straw and a biscuit.  We stood in the queue and something prompted him to smack the woman in front of us – not hard but assertively.

“That’s naughty” she said, reasonably enough.

“It certainly is” I said and  marched him off from the queue. 

I felt as ashamed as if I’d smacked the woman myself, and Jack was by then being very querulous about his milk and biscuit. I knew what he meant because I’d wanted my coffee too.  We left the shopping centre and I whacked the traffic light button and swore inwardly at the little red man.  Why were the lights always so loaded against pedestrians?  We got across and into Victoria Park –with me intending to bee-line it home to disciplinary time out in the cot for Jack at the very least.

Something was happening in the park though.  The old gardener’s lodge was being reopened as a café.  There were lots of people.

“No way” I thought as I dismissed the lingering idea of an apparently free coffee.  “Not with this little limb of Satan”

But suddenly from across the park came a wonderful noise and we saw that a strange band was advancing over the grass towards us.  It was making a wild sound only held together by a tenuous  thread of rhythm.  Squawks from a trombone, the cry of a trumpet and an ancient curly instrument with a man actually inside it - all  of them accompanied by the whomp whomp whomp of a drum.  The little band, all dressed any old how, just ambled by and, as it did so, the trumpet pointed and tooted at Jack. The cheek and the lawlessness of it took even his naughty breath away. He laughed and so did I.  We followed for a bit, rivetted by the crazy aloofness of the band people thumping, straying and converging again as they made their random way around the park.

We left eventually and once home I popped Jack in his high chair and we played the blueberry game.  Three eggcups and a blueberry under only one.  It has evolved because from babyhood he had eaten his blueberries disturbingly fast, like a chicken pecking seed. 

He had his nap after that and I finally did get my coffee and mused on the morning - Jack’s meaningless badness and my fury and how it had been dissolved in an instant by the band.    I realized perhaps for the first time in my life what music was for.  It was for us.  It offered  solace,  healing and our own silly anarchic feelings all rolled into one lovely racket and  it banished moodiness and dark feelings..

 I went to wash the coffee cup and consider the night’s dinner and thought perhaps Jack and I might make it through to three after all.