A quote: “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” ~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I’ll start with a story …
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I arrived five minutes early, but was left sitting in the lobby for fifteen minutes. Even after I was ushered into the Vice Principal’s office, I had to sit and wait while she scrolled through her tablet, left hand on a folder next to her. Another ten minutes before she even looked up to acknowledge me.
“Thank you for coming, Ms. Taylor …”
“Mrs.”
She blinked, “Oh, yes. Mrs. Taylor. I take it your partner …”
“Husband.”
Quick frown, “Your husband can’t make this meeting?”
“He sends his regrets. However, he trusts me completely.”
“Well, yes, I see. This meeting is to discuss your offspring, Peter …”
“Son. Peter is our son. Is he failing math?”
“What? No, he excels in math, beyond what we expect of third graders.”
“Then is it reading? Or history?”
I saw her jaw clench and kept a smile off my face, “Ms .. Mrs. Taylor, please. Peter is first in his class in academics …”
“Then why am I here?”
“Because he is a disruptive influence!” she shoved the folder towards me.
Papers of Peter’s drawings – planes, military jets. Tanks doodled in margins. Jeeps jumping hills on the back of spelling tests.
“These drawings are disruptive? Peter draws like this all the time. You see, his dad is a vet and …”
“That is not the point, Mrs. Taylor. The drawings are inappropriate and indicative of a propensity for violence, AND he is doing many of them for other students. This will not do.”
“Of course, it won’t,” I smiled and handed her an envelope, “We are withdrawing Peter from school.”
“Oh, you can’t do …”
I was already out the door. I held the folder of Peter’s drawings, the last thing to fit in my packed car. My husband had Peter and was beyond the state border.
Whatever the future held for us, saving our son was the most important.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: The picture up there is my friend Jason. We were always building stuff like that since my generation didn’t have online access. Long ago, we decided that he would fly something like that and I would be the one to build it.
It was just after he turned eight when he got sick. Within three months, he couldn’t go out and play. A month after that, I was at his funeral. I had shut down and barely interacted with anyone for a long time. One day, I was sitting at home and my brother dragged me out of the house. “You need to see this” was all he said.
It was called a Maker Space. A whole bunch of people just building things for fun. The welcomed me and taught me how to read blueprints, build basic things and showed me that life is still worth it.
I threw myself back into school. Within five years, I had a double Major in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. I began creating fun things for kids and did well for myself. Then one day, mom sent me that picture. Two years later, I built a glider just like that one in Brian’s memory.
I’m old enough to remember when playgrounds still had big swing sets and tall metal slides and jungle gyms — and there was gravel under them, not wood chips or sand. The boys would fly as high as they could manage on the swings, pretending they were fighter pilots out of a war movie and jumping to the ground to “bail out.”
By the time I graduated from high school, such play would not be tolerated. I heard from my younger siblings that kids who jumped out of a swing at the top of its arc had to sit out the rest of recess so they’d understand it was too dangerous. Within a decade the traditional tall metal slide had vanished in favor of shorter, enclosed spiral slides with no opportunity to fall off, and monkey bars were replaced by smaller climbing gyms where even little kids were never more than a few inches above the ground.
It’s interesting to see how different things are here on this wild new world we’re settling, helping the Kitties build their long picket line against the Lobsters and their determination that only hive intelligence should exist. School playgrounds are getting put together from whatever materials the locals can put together, and once again the children are playing at war, pretending they’re piloting aerospace fighters in one or another of the battles they’ve seen on the news videos.
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