Ramsden Park

Rachelle and I took our son Jones to Ramsden Park on the weekend.

It was another very hot day and everybody there was looking forward to letting their kids loose in the splash pad, but it wasn’t quite ready when we got there. A worker dressed in a full body orange hazmat suit waded through the water carefully pouring chlorine, while the children, confined to the perimeter by their parents, twitched like racehorses, desperate to get out of the gate and into the world. When the All Clear sign was given, the children ran screaming and dancing into the fountains of water, and the goodness and fortune in that moment was a living, profound thing. The parents happy and relieved, receded into shade, and the worker in the hazmat suit stepped out of that second skin revealing her astonishing, natural beauty as if a slow-motion scene from a movie. All afternoon, all summer, perhaps, similarly aged teen boys hung about, trying to think of winning things to say.

Jones played hard for about ninety minutes. Everything urgent and happy, everything expanding. And when it was over and we started to walk up the street to the car, we came upon a home that was being renovated. A worker was operating a digger, and to Jones this was a Bigfoot sighting. Jones was born under the sign of The Digger, you see. The Digger is his spirit guide. The Digger is everything. And the man driving it saw the impossible wonder in Jones’ face and offered to let him come into the cab and sit on his lap for a minute while he worked. And Jones did, his little hands on the levers, his life now something he was dreaming as much as something he was living.

Jones, an inch away from three, glowing like a little sun. And I am thinking about memory and when it begins, and as he was smiling out at Rachelle and I, everyone so proud and happy, all I could think was, “Let it be now, please Lord, let this be the first waking memory of his life in this world.”