The 10-Day New Year's Challenge - Day 8

 January 8. Playing in the Sandbox, by Scott Frank

Your prompt for today:
Imagine yourself in your childhood backyard, playground, schoolyard—wherever you would play. Write about that place. What toys or tools are you playing with? Are you alone? Is anyone there with you? If so, can you make them talk, but without thinking about it? Does something happen, say, inside the house, or across the yard, or up in the sky? Stop writing the minute it feels like work!

---

Whenever I'm stuck on a prompt, I just ask myself, "Self, WWMD?"  Well, actually, I used to Google that, but Google was always like, "Did you mean WebMD?  You are typing like you're having a stroke."  So now I just think it.  Because we all know it stands for What Would Madonna Do.  And she'd start by quoting herself:

This used to be my playground
This used to be my childhood dream
This used to be the place I ran to
Whenever I was in need of a trip to the ER friend

And on the playgrounds of my childhood, I was probably just on the verge of breaking a bone (it happened thrice - wrist, elbow, and nose at ages 4, 10, and 18, respectively...).  Just about to endure a massive splinter from one of those marvelous wooden playgrounds of the 80s and 90s.  Just about to encounter a massive wasp nest inside the tire tunnel on our elementary playground built out of old tractor tires, which was, except during very hot weather, much less conducive to injury than the tetanus-fest it replaced.  Playgrounds are fun, but the real fun lies in the very real potential for catastrophe.

I don't think playing on the playground as a kid was ever as fun, though, as a clandestine adult trip to the playground.  I might be conflating two separate nights, but my last fond memory of a trip to the playground involved two carloads of friends on a hot September night.  

It was Labor Day weekend, and we had all graduated college earlier that summer.  As was our habit throughout our college years, we swung by a Dunkin' Donuts after closing time and one of us (usually me) hopped in the dumpster in search of the garbage bag full of ever-so-slightly stale donuts they toss at the end of the shift.  This particular night, we drove to a park and spent a riotous half hour slingshotting the donuts across the parking lot.  

There was one other car in the parking lot that night, and we assumed its occupants were off in the woods doing something illicit (drugs, sex, whatever, not our business). A couple of the frosted donuts mayyyy have skimmed the hood of the sex car and left a smear.

All the donuts exhausted, we decamped to the playground.  There were about 8 of us giddily laughing and bouncing on the jump bridge when a disheveled couple emerged from the woods.  The sex car.  Our laughter tapered off and, one by one, we paused our jumping as we watched the lovers approach their vehicle.  

They were too far away for us to overhear, but we could plainly see the guy taking pictures of his car and then...Oh no.  He was stalking towards our cars.  Photographing our license plates.  Dialing.  Phone to his ear.  Definitely calling the cops.  It was no longer a game.  It was no longer a childhood dream.  

And I'm now realizing over a decade later how much of that story is messed up.  I mean, dumpster diving, whatever whatever, but we were some assholes for making such a mess in that parking lot, and it was not cool to get our sugary mess all over a stranger's car.  But the seriously messed up part is how a bunch of middle class white kids got off with a warning; the cops were grateful to respond to such an absurd "problem" on a night when they were braced for bringing in a bunch of DUI's and the like.  Had we been black, brown, or of a lower socioeconomic status, we might still be experiencing consequences of that night of youthful idiocy.  Instead, we gathered trash bags and shovels, cleaned up our mess, and went on with our lives.  We should all be so lucky.