Willard Park Playground Review

I went to Willard Park playground the dark night of the election, as the votes were being counted, as things were getting bad, but still hadn’t really gotten bad yet. I’m not sure why I picked that playground—I told the boys in the chat that I was trying to decide whether to spend that time at a real Berkeley-ass park, or one of the Oakland parks, and for some reason, I chose the Berkeley-ass park—but I guess it was because that park is so small, so tight, and so crowded that you always end up talking to people. I thought maybe I wanted to talk to people? Usually when I’m there, I end up talking to people.

That’s not always necessarily a good thing: the first time I took the babies there, the first person I talked to—who sort of came right up to me when I arrived—said a bunch of normal playground chit-chat things, but also, at some point, said something like “everyone here pretty knows each other.” I didn’t know anyone there. But it did feel that way, like you’ve wandered into a bar and you’re the only one that doesn’t realize it’s a private party, and everyone there thinks they’re being polite and not saying anything, but also, at a certain point, you kind of pick up the vibe, and at that point, actually, it gets kinda weird.

It’s the sort of playground where if a kid gets in a tiny scuffle with your kid, say, if that kid thinks your kid is getting too close to the slide that he’s on, and he doesn’t like that—even though you can see that your blameless kid is just wandering around—and if, for example, that kid were to yell at your kid, to warn them away, and if that were to make your kid cry, that kid’s parent would rush over with the speed and efficiency of an attack helicopter, and whisk their kid away, and address you with a sense of “we’re all sorry this happened,” but you’ll be left to comfort your kid, and other kid’s parent will make no effort, for example, to make their kid say “sorry” or in some way soften the situation, or pretend that we are all friends now, or learn each others’ names. It will all be fine, but that kid, and his parent, will stay at the other end of the park, and you will sort of feel like you and your kids should not go to that end of the park. Which is fine, everything is fine. But that’s the sort of park it is.

No one talked about the election, at least not to me. Some of the parents were on their phones, but I was on my phone too, and we didn’t talk to each other. It was getting dark.

Some fun things the kids can do while you’re reading the things-haven’t-gotten-bad-yet-but-they-certainly-aren’t-getting-good results on your phone: they can balance on the walkway around the tree at the top of the park and walk around and around, and probably fall a few times, but it’s basically fine, it isn’t far to fall. There is a good slide, a good tire swing, some balancing step-stones, and some of those… how to describe them, what 510 families describes as a “creative play structure,” and, like, that is the right way to describe it, to describe the way it isn’t anything more specific than a structure, and you have to create a way to play on it, because there kind of isn’t a right way to play on it. It’s very well-designed, a mix of basic equipment, some unusual equipment, and the right amount of empty space to re-purpose. A kid once brought chalk and everybody used the chalk to chalk the ground.

People around the playground have been coming here a long time, clearly; it is a real Berkeley-ass park, a big lawn with lots of lawn-sitters, frisbee people, and so on. The sort of park whose emptiness is weird. And it’s the sort of park that’s been like it is a long time—no trace of the emptiness of a gentrification park, the tree is tall and exactly in its maturity—even while everything is being re-made and made new: there’s a new “clubhouse” being built, lots of the equipment is new, and it’s the sort of Berkeley-ass park where you can look in most directions and see the ways that Berkeley is changing. It’s the park where I and my now-wife got randomly caught being a couple in public by some friends of ours,—before we’d told anyone in our circle that we were a couple—and it’s one of those very funny memories, how we all just said “oh, hi!” and talked as if we hadn’t just accidentally revealed to them that we were now, secretly, but clearly, a couple. That was a lot of years ago, long before the babies, long before President Trump was a thing that seemed like it would be a thing. Back then, I’m sure that our eyes didn’t even notice the playground; when you don’t have kids, a playground especially one as contained, as tucked in, and as neat as this one just melts into the backdrop.

Anyway, it was getting dark, time to wrap things up. Election day was only a couple days since the time changed, so it got dark an hour earlier than even the shortening days had been getting dark, and we were all just starting to get used to that darkness. Everyone started leaving, suddenly. Nothing had happened yet on our phones, exactly, and the darkness hadn’t suddenly happened—like usual, it happened gradually—but suddenly everyone was moving in the same direction. “They should put in lights,” I said, to another father whose kid was as reluctant to leave and go home as mine were, and he said something like “yeah, they should! I wonder why they don’t.” Maybe he thought, but didn’t say, what I was thinking: no lights because they don’t want to make the park too friendly for homeless people? But the result of that was everyone in the dark, everyone leaving, everyone moving before the sun was down completely.