My son Graham loves the bus. Specifically, he loves taking a variety of SEPTA’s Philadelphia city buses around the Roxborough neighborhood where we live, and to various points of interest across the city. He’s gotten adept at reading numbers and now points to each passing bus with an excited announcement of the route. “There goes the 35 bus, daddy! … Oooh, a 9 bus!” Often, he will suggest an outing with a bus route attached. Most frequently, the 38, which connects the Wissahickon Transportation Center (which we can easily reach from a couple routes that go near our house) to the Please Touch Museum, our local children’s museum housed in a grand hall left over from the 1876 Centennial Exposition.
When we were heading out for an outing this afternoon after work, PTM was already closed. But Smith Memorial, a free indoor/outdoor playground, still had some time left before shuttering for the day. And with Alex headed to a movie and plum delivery tour in the car, we were planning to take the bus wherever we went. The bus turns every journey into its own destination, so this was no problem, but it can take 30-40 minutes for the bus to get us to Smith, by which point we’d have maybe less than an hour there. Would it be worth it to go?
It would be easy for me to say that the trade-off wasn’t worth it. I was sorely tempted. We’d talked hypothetically* earlier in the day about going to Smith, but would he really be sad if we swapped it out for Gorgas? He’d have more quality time there and we’d have less transition time back toward dinner. And it was bath night (we aim for every other night) on top, so time was of the essence to get him in bed at a reasonable time.
*I’m fully aware that no discussion is hypothetical for a toddler. To mention something as a vague possibility, or as a distant-future occurrence, is almost always to promise that it is definitely happening in five minutes or less.
On almost a whim, I decided to just go for it. Honestly, if we took the bus down and walked the half-mile to Smith and found it unexpectedly closed and had to return, the whole journey would still be a good time for Graham. He’d post up on his high back seat of the 32 bus, eyes peeled for buses, mail trucks, and garbage trucks going the other way, and we would have made good use of our time together. The downside of him potentially expressing disappointment, however temporary, seemed worse than a wild goose bus.
It wasn’t wild, despite the fact that we’d asked Alexa (he can basically talk to Alexa now, getting his request understood about a quarter of the time, which portends imminent trouble) and she’d misreported that Smith was already closed before we left. Google contradicted this and away we flew, snagging the stroller to minimize the impact of the half-mile walk on the Smith end and ensure that I wouldn’t have to carry him home that distance in the fuzzy late-afternoon heat. The whole way over to Ridge Ave, where we would catch the 32, he spoke with reverent anticipation.
I prepared him for the fact that the indoor portion closes an hour early and, as such, would almost certainly be closed by the time we got there. Graham prefers the indoor part of Smith, in no small part because we often choose Smith over a local playground on days where outdoor play is ill-advised. Between the midsummer swelter, periodic thunderstorms, and especially the spate of recent Canadian wildfires toxifying the air, we have frequent reason to confine him to indoor play. But at Smith, there are rooms full of toys, plus a basement that functions a bit like a toddler gym, with small slides, climbing areas, ride-on cars, and three-foot basketball hoops. After all this opportunity, the outside is often an afterthought, despite being one of the most comprehensive playgrounds in Philly.
When we arrived, we quickly rediscovered a popular but often ignored feature, which is an old smooth polished wooden slide. The slide has two curves in the middle to prevent too much escalation, and the advised practice is to grab a burlap sack from the bin at the bottom, then haul it to the top to facilitate a smooth ride.
Now normally I would take one look at this thing and inform Graham he was not to go down without parental accompaniment. But fresh from Monday’s risks, I was inclined to let him make a choice. “All right, Graham,” I addressed him at the top. “This is a fast slide. Do you want to go down by yourself or with daddy?”
“I … want to go down by myself.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah!”
“Okay!” I set him up on his burlap sack and pointed him in the right direction, leaving him balanced atop the edge. Given his typical approach to slides, I actually expected him to stall, possibly to the point of backing up a line of impatient older children behind him, as he evaluated whether he was ready for this. But to my surprise, he started inching himself forward immediately, saying “here we go!” as he reached the tipping point and started gliding down.
He made it 80% of the way without incident as I held my breath. But the last little curve made him lean back too far, bump his head, then kind of roll over on it and bump it again. He began wailing immediately.
Not worrying about the burlap, I slid down to join him and scooped him into my arms, asking him if he was okay. Two mothers posted up at the bottom had both gasped when he lost control and now stalwartly refused to make eye contact with me as I consoled my toddler. He was sobbing harder than normal for a quick bump and I started to consider how we would get to urgent care on the bus. But then he wanted to stand up and the shaking subsided to little shivers. “I’m okay, daddy,” he choked out. “It was just a little bump.”
We cleared the space, him under his own power, and I fully expected a right turn toward the gentler parts of the playground. Instead, he turned left. “I want to do it again!”
I pushed down my instinct one more time. “Okay, but you’re going with me this time.”
“Okay!”
The slide has a long circuitous path back to the top, in part to smooth out the uphill grade and largely to make space for a long line at times when the slide is overrun with eager fans. Watching Graham trundle up it at full speed reminded me uncannily of him steaming through long empty lines near the closing time of Disney World, most all of his contemporaries long since departed and making space for us to walk up to rides without waiting. When we reached the top, he patiently waited for me to settle on a sack, then position him in front of me. I confirmed he was ready, held my breath, and sent us downhill.
It was fast and smooth and utterly safe.
We looped the slide five more times before he finally turned right and took an interest in the little train cars, merry-go-round, and other play structures down the hill.
Well before closing, shortly after I’d offered a twenty-minute warning**, he said he wanted to go home. We’d been there maybe forty minutes, faced a comparably long bus ride back. But he knows his own mind and he was sure. And far from a pang of whether we’d made the right call in coming here, I was sure that this had been a great use of time. Even when we saw a 32 bus pulling off the curb and away in the homeward direction when we were only a block away, I didn’t question the call.
**I’m fully aware that my toddler doesn’t really have a grasp on what 20 minutes means. However, I am firmly convinced that giving children countdown warnings, even if they can’t understand the units of time involved, is to everyone’s benefit in smoothing transitions and reducing resistance.
When I was growing up in Oregon, after the educational disasters had landed me in homeschooling – which often amounted to hours spent at the public library reading and doing some volunteer work – I felt isolated. During the week, I was on a vastly different schedule than my friends, and the distances between houses made impromptu social calls for all but one close friend impossible. On summer nights, there was baseball on the radio and a lingering sun outside that allowed me play basketball or baseball or pretend in the 1.5-acre yard while my duck looked on and sometimes followed me around. But in winter, it was dark and stormy early.
One night, perhaps because a friend was going, I suggested to my dad that we go to a high school basketball game. The high school was far – 15-20 minutes away – and my dad was tired. He was a bit unclear what my interest was, then a little unsure about the cost. But I convinced him and we had a great time. His energy redoubled under the caged lights of the the high school gym and the excitement of the game fused with the intimate accessibility of the small-town venue to make it feel like something special.
After that first night, it became a bit of a tradition for us. In total, we maybe only went to five or six games, but it was something we discussed doing more often and it spanned at least two seasons. One particularly rough night, we found a game listed in the paper that was several towns over and didn’t even involve one of our two local high schools. I felt a little sheepish even asking, but he was excited to go and said that that night, he needed to just get in the car and drive somewhere. Anywhere. Some nights were just like that, he explained, restless and demanding. It would be years before I fully understood, nights in Albuquerque home from college when I would just pick a cardinal direction on one of the two bisecting interstates and go. Out as far as Acoma, even Clines Corners one night.
We drove out to the desert, just to lie down beneath this bowl of stars.
I loved those silly high school basketball games. They were fun and thrilling and trivial and shared. Years later, we would talk about it like something we’d seen in a movie. Did we really do that? And that one night, where did we go, Knappa? And Astoria and Seaside weren’t even playing?
Do the extra thing. Do the crazy thing. Do it when you don’t want to. Do it when it doesn’t make any sense. Do it because someday you will be dead and your child, if you’re lucky enough to have one, if they’re lucky enough to survive you, will remember it and smile and think that, that, was really living.
Do it because sometimes just saying “I love you” doesn’t have the umph of following a random whim all the way to its natural conclusion, to see what happens, because you can. Do it because you can, while you can.
This is the tenth post in the One Thing series.
#9: Climbing the Ladder
#8: Home Depot Away from Home
#7: It’s the Heart that Matters More
#6: Bed by Day
#5: Picking Plums
#4: Forgive, Don’t Forget
#3: Call Your Mother
#2: In the Land of Make-Believe
#1: Wistful Wisteria
Introduction: Announcement and Rules
