Plastic Playground

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Originally uploaded by johnwporter

I remember the playground at my elementary school. It was made completely out of steel and if you fell from the top of the slide onto the ground it would have probably killed you. The whole playground was a hodgepodge of slides, teeter-totters, a monkey bars, etc. placed there most likely sometime in the 70s. We even had a merry-go-round. Do those things still exist? Scotty Guggisberg broke his arm on the merry-go-round in kindergarten.

About the time I was in Jr. High they removed all the old playground equipment and replaced it with one of these pre-assembled, multi-colored, plastic, "safe" playgrounds. They covered what was once grass with a bunch of gravel. The new playground basically sucked.

There are two distinct memories I have of the playground. One of them took place in third grade during bus recess, which was the recess I had to go to after school and wait until my mom got off work (at the school) to take me home. We were playing football and I had tackled this one kid and he began pouting about grabbing people by the neck when being tackled. I'm pretty sure I said "Quit being a baby. If you don't like it, bring it." Then he said "No, you bring it," and he pushed me. I wasn't going to take any of his crap, so I put him in a headlock. The teacher blew her whistle to signal that bus recess was over and I dropped him, crying on the ground. This kid had "little man" syndrome and deserved every ass kicking that came his way.

My other memory, I think was in second grade when a kid named Joseph and I had this can and we were playing catch with it by tossing it over a fence. We couldn't afford balls apparently. It was somewhat difficult to get the can over the fence so we put some rocks into it to make it heavier. Word got around to some stupid kid who told our teacher that we were throwing a can with rocks inside. Well, throwing rocks on the playground was against the rules. We kinda got into trouble and our punishment was that we had to carry a rock around with us for a whole week. If we lost that rock we were going to get licks. Even as a little kid, that sounded like the stupidest punishment ever. I ended up losing my rock but was able to replace it with an similar rock before my teacher found out.