I've got a funny feeling they've got plastic in the Afterlife

My family and I are in the process of pulling up our stakes and moving across the country to a place where, more or less, everything is new. Everyone will be a stranger. The town and the surrounding towns will be unfamiliar. Mysteries will exist around every corner and down each alley.

While I am beyond excited about the prospect of not having ties to or roots in my new home, the process of packing, getting ready and starting to say goodbyes has triggered the inevitible wave of nostalgia that I knew would arrive, sooner or later.

Yesterday, I took my family to Vasona Park in Los Gatos. When I was a kid, Vasona Park held an almost magicial status. There was everything for a kid to love. There were dangerously tall play structures built of wood and metal. There was a large murky lake with a dam on the backside where you could watch a huge torrent of water roaring through the overflow gates. There was a maze made of bamboo that one could spend hours in. I often, purposefully, found one of the many dead ends the maze contained, deep within the center, and I'd sit and read for entire days in August 1980.

Going back today, as an adult man with almost 36 years under the bridge, I'm saddened by how things have changed. I could still see traces of the things I loved, as a child, but they are ghost-like forms of what they were 25 years ago.



Los Gatos Creek feeds into the lake. There was, and still is, an island that sat in the middle of the creek that determined kids could wade out to. My friend, Mike Alberta, and I spent almost everyday, one hot summer week, "camping out" on this island. We brought Ritz crackers, Capri Sun juice boxes, pocket knives, and binoculars and hid in the dense foliage, watching the unsuspecting park revelers as they walked by, flew kites and sat on benches sharing "private moments". It's now (and probably was then) a bird sanctuary and it's strictly forbidden to wade into the water, much less across it to the island.

Later, my family and I walked past a boat launch where I remember renting a canoe with my Dad and sister and we shoved off into the lake for a floating picnic. I alternated between rowing and cutting pieces off a log of salami (you don't really see salami sold that way very much anymore - it's almost always presliced and packaged) . My Dad stood up to take a picture and before we knew what was happening, the canoe flipped over, dumping us and our belongings into the dark lake. It was a cold day so we were all wearing fluffy, down filled coats that quickly absorbed the water and became heavy. The canoe had already sunk to the bottom and I remember struggling to swim and hearing my Dad yelling to "take off your coats!" so that their weight wouldn't drag us down, along with the canoe. We got our coats off and swam to shore, mostly being pulled along by my Dad as he stuggled to stay afloat while keeping 2 kids above the surface. When we finally made it to the shore, I remember feeling blissfully happy, laying there on the dock listening to the creaking sounds of the dock and the slapping of the water beneath it. My father had lost a valuable camera and I remember being sad that we had lost an entire day's worth of photos from all the fun we had had before it sank beneath us.

A couple of months later, the three of us were walking and came across a huge mud puddle. It started as a half-innocent splash of muddy water aimed at my Dad but it grew into a 3-way all out mudfight of almost epic proportions. We threw caution to the wind, and for a few hours, cast off our roles as "parent/child" and "brother/sister" and the mud transformed us into giggling friends as we rubbed it in each other's hair, wallowed and rolled around and just had a truly blissful afternoon of spontaneous, "irresponsible" fun. Strangers walked by and watched the spectacle. Some took pictures. Some looked on with expressions of what was almost shocked awe. Most could not help but laugh along with us. To add to the mix, there were tons of these spiky seed pods laying around everywhere (we called them "monkey balls" back then. Now, I know them to be the seed pods of Liquid Ambar trees but I've taught my daughter to call them "monkey balls"). These were plenty of fun to stick into each others shirts and pants to create bearable discomfort. When the cold from the wetness and the mud finally got to be too much, we walked home. The look on my stepmother's face immediately broke the spell of the happy afternoon. "There's no way you're coming into this house like that!" and my Dad immediately became "Dad" again and said, "Yeah, you're probably right" and made my sister and I strip down in the driveway where he hosed us off with cold water from the spigot. My sister and I were miserable and crying and blue from cold before we were clean enough to be admitted into our "home".

Now, walking with my family, I can't shake the feeling that the park feels haunted. There's nothing but ghosts of what I remember about it. What used to be a place of fun and mystery has become an overly safe and sterile.

There used to be a real fighter plane that served as a playgound climbing structure. It was totally intriguing to kids because of its rust and sharp edges and shiny, silver metal frame that would absorb the Summer sun's heat to the point where only the extremely brave and determined would venture out onto it. Once you made it past the scorching hot wings and fuselage, you could sit in the cool cemented cockpit and you felt like you had been through a sort of rite of passage to reach that spot that only the brave knew the comforts of. The plane is still there but now it has been covered with smoothe, cool fiberglass which makes it look like a fake airplane and it sits by itself in the middle of the playground, ignored by children who see it for what it is - just another boring piece of plastic.

It made me happy that my daughter ignored signs, warning of the potential dangers of the creek and lake and paid more attention to their post-storm turbulence, than to the pre-fab plastic playground that looks like all the other playgrounds across suburbia.

Parks and playground, it seems, now follow the same model as planned communities and strip malls where all individuality and uniqueness are eliminated. It used to be that countries, states and towns had individual charactaristics, traits and qualities. Now, it looks like we are content to allow our communities, parks and children to be formed into acceptable molds of safety, expectedness, and normalcy. Generic playgrounds, such as the ones that McDonald's offers at their inner-city restaurants, just get kids used to these bland norms early.

If I try really hard, I can see the ghosts of my past as we sling mud and monkey balls in the spectral field that now is home to a huge parkinglot where people pay alot of money to "play" in a space where, for me, fun wears a deathmask and the sound of the nearby freeway is a dirge.

It's definitely time to leave. It's time to peek around a corner and not know what's going to be there. It's time to give a new starting place to history. Here I go...

(This highschool-photography-class-style photo is for you, Tex)