Yesterday, Rachel wanted to take Jonah to the park. We spent about half an hour researching parks with cool play structures for kids at the various parks in Albany before settling on Eleanor Hackleman Park. Off we go, armed with a picnic lunch and Jonah's favorite outdoor toy at the moment, a little tikes baseball set. This thing is a little advanced for an 18 month old...the bat's taller than Jonah and it actually pops the ball up so you can hit a moving pitch, but he loves the sound it makes and watching the balls pop up, so it serves its purpose.
At the park, there's a few kids playing on the swing set with their dad. All the kids are wearing cowboy boots. We start playing on the play structure with Jonah. One of the cowboy booted kids runs over and draws a line in the barkdust and says "you can't cross this line." I look over at the kid's dad, who is busy pushing four kids on the swings. Rachel just says "oops, looks like we just did," and continues walking Jonah over to the slide. Again the kid blocks our path. "This is my play structure, you can't use it," he says. This is the most stubborn four year old I've ever seen. He continues to harass us. Rachel tries to take a picture of Jonah, he gets between her and Jonah so she can't. He blocks the stairs, so I just lift Jonah onto the structure. He proceeds to knock my hat off with a stick.
There's another play structure there, so we head over to that one. There's a few other kids playing on it, so I figure this kid will get bored of harassing us and go after one of them. No luck. "You can't play here!" he says again. "Look kid," I say. "That girl just ran right behind you, why can she use it?" The kid looks at the girl and says "because she's family. She's one of us." I look around, and sure enough, every kid on the play structure is hispanic. "I think we've just been treated differently because of the color of our skin," I say to Rachel. Not wanting to get into some sort of racial talk with this kid or his dad, we just leave the play structure and go to play with the pitching machine.
Little did I know that this was not only Jonah's favorite toy, but apparently every other kid at the park too. As soon as I turned it on, three or four kids came running over, including the racist cowboy. "Can I have a turn?" he asks. I'm really not sure what to say at this point, but I say "Now why should we let you play with us when you wouldn't let us use the play structure?" He says "I'm sorry, you can play on it. Can I have a turn?" Meanwhile, Rachel's trying to keep another kid from getting to close to Jonah, who wields the bat sort of like a tomohawk and is liable to decapitate anyone who gets too close. This kid either can't understand Rachel, or doesn't listen, because he walks right up there. Jonah missed with the bat thankfully, but the kid took a whiffleball right to the face as he peered down the hole where the ball pops up. At that point I packed it up and took it back to the car, much to the dismay of Jonah, who was just starting to enjoy all the commotion. At this point cowboy's dad realizes his kid isn't by the swingset anymore and comes over and carts him off.
After that whole fiasco, it actually turned into a pretty nice day at the park, but from our first experience and stories I've heard from other parents about kids running around unsupervised while their parents smoke cigarettes, drink Double Big Gulps and text their friends, I'm not so sure I'm keen on making future public park visits.
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