I recently received an Email from my mother enlightening me to the fact that a group of singers was on CBC radio, a sure sign of her age that she listens to nothing else (Love you Mom!), from my former Alma mater, St. Justin Elementary School. This reminded me briefly of some of my time spent there.
One of the things I recall is the fact that, for most of my 7 years spent there, we had no playground. The students, at recess, would stare longingly across the school yard at the public school across the way. It was larger and had a massive playground that was absolutely infested with children three times a day, five days a week. Brief forays across the way to participate in the obvious oodles of fun the public kids were having were frowned upon and met with stern admonishment.
When I was in either grade four or five, one summer saw the inclusion of a small playground at Saint J's for the next school year. All the kids were agog with excitement. To the chagrin of the student body, its size was such that each of the grades were allotted only a single day of the week to claim it for their own. Kindergarten and grade one on Mondays, grades two and three on Tuesdays and so forth. So when your day came every week, you made darned sure to take full advantage of it.
What comes to mind first is playing on the monkey bars. (Oddly fitting, given the title of this website.) What comes to mind second is the lesson that one ought never to play on the twirly slide unless it's the day after a good rain. 'Cause then, you know, you're pretty sure it's clean.
Playing on the monkey bars was great fun. Me and some of the other boys would gather to watch some of the girls perform what seemed like an unimaginably athletic manoeuvre. They called it a 'baby drop'. It consisted of hanging from one's knees at the apex of the arching bars with your body dangling vertically below. A little impetus resulted in a pendulum-like motion of the suspended torso. Once the right rhythm had been attained by one of the girls, she would release her ankles at just the right moment, resulting in a graceful rotating descent to the ground, and landing on her feet underneath the bars.
Well, we fellas thought that was just the neatest thing, so took it upon ourselves to go one better. It was all well and good to land gracefully on one's feet, but where's the challenge in that? From where stems the bravado? No, we made a slight alteration and renamed the move. It was now called the 'suicide baby drop'. The guys would hang suspended from the monkey bars in the same fashion as the girls and, without initiating any angular momentum, would drop face first into the sand six feet below. This was followed by huge gales of laughter and a muddled stew of boys on the raised wooden platform to see who got to go next.
The move was improved by adding just enough of a swing so that a boy could do a belly flop on the sand instead of landing on his head. This lasted just long enough until one boy landed flat on his back, winded himself, and scared all the other boys out of doing it anymore. It's memories like this that sometimes amaze me when I realize I've never broken a bone in my body.
And make me a little afraid of what shenanigans my own son will get involved in when he's a little older. Boys that age hardly have any fear at all!
The trend now is to minimize any risk whatsoever with playground equipment, so monkey bars have effectively gone the way of the dodo. In our neighbourhood, they took down the 'unsafe' wooden playground apparatus with tire swings, wooden beams for balancing, flexible bridge, etc. and replaced it with 2 plastic jobs that bore even 2 years olds after 5 minutes. Fun effectively eliminated, all in the name of safety (and fear of lawsuits).
Paula
Posted by: Paula | Wednesday, 08 December 2004 at 09:45 AM