Observations on a Kid’s Party
We went to a kids birthday party today, for our friends’ 2 year old. It was a lot of fun. Tons of kids there, so there wasn’t as much pressure to make small talk with the adults as there is at most gatherings.
Downside, couldn’t find a time or space to share a joint with the host and selected friends. There was the grandmother, who kept dropping things and looking like she was about to say something but it was just shaking, there was the friend from work and, of course, there were the kids. I get high in front of my own kids, but I’m not sure the other parents would appreciate it.
It was a lovely little spot. They’ve got a nice flat up on the 5th floor and this was just the little yard space behind the house. Not much, really, just a patch of grass with some scruffy bushes around two sides and low fence around all of it, separating it from similar spaces behind all of the 6 or 7 story buildings around the block. There were a couple of picnic tables, a sandbox and a swingset-slide set, so this was a perfectly designed space, as far as the kids were concerned. Their priorities are simple, but certainly no less valid.
I’d thought that the birthday boys baby brother, who is maybe a month old if that, would steal the show, but he slept right through it.
One thing that was cool: Someone pointed out that there was a nice breeze, and how odd it was that that should be the case since we were totally surrounded by buildings, in a Brick Hollow, and I had an image of what it must be like outside, practically storm conditions, and one of the more recent arrivals pointed out that it was still as death outside, a still, heavy, inside-of-the-oven summer day, and I remembered that yes, yes it was.
So, it was a pretty cool effect, a cooling breeze in the middle of a hot summer day, an island of green in the middle of the city, somewhat in the manner of New York’s Central Park, although that is always jam-packed with people so you lose the isolated tranquillity, more like an island that nobody ever goes to or something like that, and I realized that there is a basic misconception in my book “Perfectomundo” and that is that the world can be reformed by broad, sweeping construction projects which is not entirely untrue, but it is also likely to be reformed and rebuilt over time, a great deal of time, one backyard garden at a time, until an archipelago of utopias stretches across every land mass inhabited by man.
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