Wading Pools Reopening

There's a picture on M.'s Instagram that captures what it felt like to have the parks and pools reopen last summer. It's posted July 31st. J. is a big, sturdy two-and-a-half and he's running alone through ankle-deep water that's dappled with sunlight and ripples. Droplets of water hang in the iPhone's momentary suspension of gravity, and J.'s shorts and t-shirt are stretched with his forward energy. It's a moment and a movement, both full of joy. Last year was a strange combination of being stuck in a moment (we couldn't get out of) and being propelled along the curve of the coronavirus graph, longing to know that there was somewhere worth going and that we were getting there.

Toronto contracted into our first lockdown in March 2020 (it physically pains me to have to type "first" in that phrase), and along with everything else city parks closed. Play equipment was strung with yellow warning tape and notices featuring humanless representations of faces and masks appeared on all the gates. It wasn't safe to be here, not if you were a person. Fields and forests benefit from fallow seasons, but little city parks are for growing children. I can't help but think, too, of the disappointed squirrels, robbers robbed in turn of the snack-filled strollers they love to raid. I don't really feel sorry for them—having to tell a hungry two-year-old that no, he can't have his favourite snack which he well knows was packed for him is a special kind of exercise in bearing bad news—but as lockdown stretched from two weeks into summer, desperate parents would gladly have fed the squirrels to bursting to get the parks back. It's not just that parks are easy places to play, or that you're allowed to let the kids shout here. Parks give our leisure purpose.

"Leisure" might be a technically correct term, but when there's nowhere to go and you need an outdoor activity that will keep both a toddler and an adult engaged, those lockdown days looked nothing like the languid autonomy of the word "leisure" gliding over the tongue. The fact is, happy kids are kids who've been given a good solid transitive verb to wrestle with. They do things to things. When the parks and their pools reopened in June/July, we could walk to the park, splash in the pool, ride on the swings. We could turn moments into movement. Without getting into the car, turning on any screens, or unwrapping anything wrapped in plastic.

It's difficult to persuade a child to turn left rather than right at a neighbourhood intersection, even with the allure of an inviting destination ("but I want to go to the library that way!"). The best walks aren't a string of successful negotiations, but single movements from Home to Park or Store or Library. Going to the pool means hours in the sun that don't need explaining, where purpose and joy are easily found.

At this point let me interrupt to say that yes, I am absolutely doing what every writing parent does (and probably too often), writing about myself by writing about my child. I need purpose just as much as J. does. Our cultural "moment" isn't one I'm particularly happy to be stuck in, and while we're back in a civic lockdown in Toronto, eventually emerging out of our tiny static social bubbles won't necessarily open the new vocational purpose I'm starting the search for. There's also an element of fiction in the idyllic meaning I'm hanging on those outdoor pools, but that I won't apologize for—it's a picture of the world I want.

Here's how U2's "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" ends, climbing over the backing vocals with Bono's strained, powerful, upper register:

And if, and if the night runs over
And if the day won't last
And if your way should falter
Along this stony pass

It's just a moment
This time will pass

It's simultaneously victorious and mournful, as if the singer knows that moments can go on forever. Looking back at the harmless airborne droplets and joyful splash of J. running in the wading pool, it strikes me that with with the right kind of file storage some moments could go on forever, and I'm ok with that. Or, put more poetically: it's worth remembering that the best moments aren't "just" moments, but have movement of their own.

I hope the parks reopen again soon.

wading pool at Toronto's Christie Pits Park, 9 Aug. 2015 / 📷 @shawnmicallef on Twitter