EVAN'S PLAYGROUNDS

As a professional writer with thirty-odd (occasionally very odd) years of experience, I've decided to showcase some of my favorite magazine essays, articles and columns. Many of my self-proclaimed best are among my most personal. These brief glimpses add up to a lifetime stew of emotions: joy, grief, humor, fear, poignancy, love and regret.

I'm leading off with Evan's Playgrounds, which appeared in the August, 1998 issue of Cleveland Magazine. My son being three at the time, I'd rediscovered with him the joys of neighborhood parks and playgrounds. The idea I'd pitched my editor was a review of some of the hot local play spots, but as I worked on the piece, it become something altogether different.

My editor loved it. Hope you do, too.

David Searls


It's a long, grassy patch of land at the corner of Bunts Road and Merl Avenue in Lakewood that someone stuck a couple of swing sets and slides on and forgot to even give a name.
My son and I know it as the Train Park.

Its setting, amid rows of houses, along its namesake tracks and across the street from a supermarket parking lot, won't win the Train Park any urban design awards. The place was a bit fancier when Evan was a baby and it included a climbing-crawling-jumping off-sort of thing made of timber planks as thick as telephone poles. But the wood had rotted and the whole structure disappeared one night about a year ago, leaving only holes where the foundation posts had been. It was as if the town's lawyers had carted it away before the lawsuits piled up.

That's okay, because the climbing-crawling-jumping off thing was never the Train Park's main attraction. It got its name and popularity in the Searls household by its proximity to those train tracks, with only a chain-link fence to keep the steel and smoke monsters from barreling right down on us.

As soon as Evan hears the train whistle, we have to dash for the baby swing he's getting too old for—but its the swing nearest the tracks. It took me awhile to realize that you can hear the whistle blasts from Cleveland or Rocky River, so there's really no need for dashing. But try convincing Evan of that. Once he's locked in position, I push him hard and high enough that he can peer down at the monster as it roars past, shrieking in futile competition with the sound-storm.

I've rediscovered trains for myself these last couple years. They used to be on this planet to annoy me, to clog intersections and make me late for work. But now I watch and listen even when Evan isn't there, and, by God, they really are amazing creatures!

The years will pass and the thunder-and-fire ambiance will become as wearisome to my son as the music he'll hear while on hold waiting to schedule a dentist appointment. But I think that on rare occasion when all-grownup-Evan has time to stop and really listen to the whistle's distant wail he might momentarily flash back to the days when his old man helped him fly high over the screaming monsters at the Train Park.

That would be a fine way to be remembered.



The playground in Baltic Park, at Baltic Avenue and West 110th Street in Cleveland, is brand-spanking-new. And not your grandfather's playground. That's what you notice as soon as you catch sight of the jungle gym that's like nothing you've ever seen before. Its daring, colorful loops and twists make it look less like play equipment and more like the kind of modern outdoor sculpture people admire but secretly hate. It's a tubular affair painted fluorescent red and purple and lime green, and I can't imagine what material it's composed of, but I'm guessing vinyl or some patented compound impervious to ice, rain, sun and vandals. One thing I know for sure: it doesn't sit as high as it appears and I keep smacking my head as I chase Evan under it.

The ground beneath us is covered with some kind of corky substance laid over tire strips, something that puts real spring in your step. I could pass out after rapping my head once too often on the op-art contraption above me and not break anything on the fall.

The first thing that catches your attention on this new slip of land, even before the artsy head-banger, is the sign by the curb that takes up more square footage than the entire playground. More, it seems, than the front yards of the modest wood-frame homes closing in. The sign is one of those temporary things politicians make contractors put up to show citizens that their tax dollars and votes are hard at work. This one proudly proclaims that the brand-spanking-new Baltic Park was erected, or excavated, or whatever, under the direction of the City of Cleveland, and it lists a whole inventory of commissioners and directors and city planners to thank.

Evan is not impressed.

They seem to have run out of money before they got to the swings. The op-art framework is in place and ready for action, but there are no swings in the fames, so Evan urges me to reroute our outing to the Train Park.

Too bad, because there's this blond woman here with her own young son, and she's so easy to talk to. I assure myself that she's not this friendly with just anyone, and she must have noticed I'm not wearing a wedding ring. I, by the way, have noticed that she's not wearing one either. She laughs and lightly touches my elbow as she points out something cute her boy is doing, and it's been a long time since a woman has lightly touched my elbow like that.

Let's go, Da. No swings.

Thanks to the politicians and bureaucrats who blew their budgets on self-congratulatory signs as broad as barns, I must leave this playground and this interesting blond-haired woman just when things are getting interesting. Leave her before I can work up the courage to ask her name. So I shrug and move off, convinced that she touches everyone's elbow like that.

But as we leave she smiles and waves and says maybe she'll see us again here sometime.

Months later, on a hot, summer day, I read about the Baltic Children's Park being officially dedicated, which entailed the mayor dropping by to pat sweaty little heads. The full-color, front-page photo is of a clown with a child on his lap. They're sitting on a swing.

Slightly creepy, but thought provoking. It might be time for Evan and me to experience a red, purple and lime-green playground again.



There's this school at Lake and Whippoorwill avenues in Lakewood. It sits right across from a congregation of tall brick homes that might be a bit cramped for mansions, but you wouldn't complain. I don't even know the school's name, but there's a playground in front of it. It's the playground where I broke my son's collarbone.

Evan had turned two that month, which was the month my wife moved out of our home, and we had an arrangement by which we shared overnight custody until we could work out something more permanent. I had Evan alone with me at one playground or another many times before, but this was the first outing of our new arrangement.

The playground includes a dignified wooden platform with a shaky bridge and a ladder and a railing that goes most of the way around it, except at the top of that ladder. I felt sanctimoniously good about having joined my two-year-old up on the bride on that crisp, late winter morning since I'd often seen younger fathers smoking or reading the newspaper or staring off into the distance while their children played alone.

Not me. I was right up there in the thick of things, climbing and crawling and straddling the top strut of that bridge, and leaping from it to land in front of my son and surprise him.

Which it did.

Chuckling, Evan took a startled step backward, where the top of the ladder was but the railing wasn't—which any responsible father would know. I watched as, in slow motion, my son disappeared from view. I heard him land a moment later like a sack of cement.

I don't remember climbing down from the platform, so maybe I jumped, but there he was on the ground, staring up at the cold sky and crying. His heavy coat had cushioned some of the impact, but when I gently picked him up, I could see that he was holding his arm funny.

No, not funny.

At Lakewood Hospital's emergency room, the admitting nurse asked me careful questions at first, but smiled when she saw a 40-year-old man fighting back tears, and said that everything would be fine. We were ushered in quickly and I sat holding Evan's hand and wondering how things had gotten this way so quickly, my marriage as broken as my son's collarbone.

The doctor told me that collarbone fractures are among the most common injuries to young children, and no one blamed me. Not even my wife who rushed to the hospital, sobbing, from her new home on the first day of her new life.

No one blamed me. Certainly not Evan who, by lunchtime, had forgotten about his fall. He only had to wear a harness for a couple of guilt-inducing weeks before healing completely. Young children are like that, the doctor said. They heal fast.

But we don't go to that playground anymore.



You're not supposed to notice, but Lakewood Park at Lake Avenue and Belle Road is where the Arab women take their children. I certainly don't point this out to Evan, who, despite being a three-year-old who notices everything, overlooks the inescapable fact that many of the women among us are adorned in flowing gowns and heavy veils that cover their faces against the day's warmth. I have no opinion of this, it's just an observation on a perfect late-spring afternoon.
Lakewood Park is everything the Train Park isn't. It's spacious, scenic and chock-full of whatever kind of equipment you can imagine for climbing over, crawling through and falling off of.

Evan's first stop is always the swings. His advanced age and size notwithstanding, he still prefers the baby swings. That's fine with me except when I notice other fathers pushing sons Evan's age or younger on the big-boy swings. What I want to do when I see that is to sit my boy down next to them and prove we're only hanging out at those other swings by choice, not because we have to. Fortunately, the urge passes.

The park sits on an expanse of land big enough to host picnics, softball games and kite flying all at once. It's even got its own lake, for God's sake. And I'm not talking some overgrown puddle, but Lake Erie, sitting out there vaster and more permanent than many nations. On nice days, the sky merges with the water to form a hazy backdrop of blue, the sea gulls screech low overhead, begging for picnic leftovers, and you'd swear you were elsewhere. Someplace where postcards come from.

I wonder about those Arab women sometimes, whether they've ever seen so much water before. Maybe that's what drew them here. Or maybe, I remind myself, they were born in Lakewood and, like me, haven't seen a desert except on TV.

While I mull over my complicated thoughts on culture and competitive fatherhood, all Evan does is swing, calling for my renewed effort on the pushing when my attention wavers. We make a game of it, Evan telling me he wants to go higher and me asking whether or not he's sure. The game requires me to put just a tinge of alarm in my voice, as if he should very carefully consider his answer before committing to such dizzying heights.

But he's always sure. I don't know what he's thinking up there. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe he's just enjoying the way the clear sky and the blue water come together while the gulls screech for food.

Life's perfect when you're three and can almost touch that sky.