I don’t remember the exact wording of it but there is a meme that I come across from time to time that shows a handful of adolescents with the caption “at some point you and your friends all went outside to play for the last time and none of you knew it.” It’s a very bittersweet reminder of time’s passing and the loss of youthful innocence.
It’s something that I thought about last Wednesday as I watched my daughter and her friends sled down a large hill near the park that we had spent so many Wednesday afternoons at. It was partly due to memories of myself and my friends doing the same but also the realization that more than likely we had gone to that park to play on the equipment for the last time at some point and not known it.
For those that don’t know, I work somewhat inconvenient hours at a hospital. The one constant is that Wednesdays I am off and that is daddy-daughter day. More often than not over the past nine years that has meant our local playground.
Hundreds of hours have been spent here and it’s been the locale for dozens of blog posts.
Most of the days were uneventful. A “picnic” of an unhealthy snack picked up at the gas station across the street and then she’d be off playing, new friends immediately made if no old ones were present. A lot of me just sitting around and watching but also a lot of deep and ridiculous conversations spent at that picnic table drinking chocolate milk and sitting next to each other on the swings when she didn’t have anybody to chase. For a really long time, this was just one of our things, right up there with hiking adventures and roller skating.
I have no idea when that stopped, when the last time we sat at that table was. We started spending a lot of time at the skate park across the parking lot a few years ago but that was usually in addition to our regular routine, not instead of. It makes sense that she is now too old to just play with random kids, that the monkey bars and all other challenges presented there have long been conquered. There’s lots of big kid stuff to do now, things a lot more thrilling than that old green slide.
For most of this summer, the park was taped off, like the rest of the world closed down and off-limits. On Wednesdays now school consists of the very seat that I am sitting in now, fractions filling the screen instead of the silly words of a sappy old fool. The days of her running out to the parent pick-up line and begging to go feel like ancient history.
I stood on the sledding hill, looking over at the snow-covered slides and swings and climbing walls, and thought about how sometime last fall we had probably taken our last trip there. I wondered if sometime in the future she would look at it and smile, thinking of her childhood and remembering our time there.
I wonder if the snow will melt enough by Wednesday to have a picnic.
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Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com and is republished on Medium.
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