CHILD TIME

On Sunday I took Kaya a few kilometers north up the road to the nice little town of Kitakomatsu (one of the places we first considered building our house), site of Genkimura, the optimal free public playground in the forests up on the mountainside. There they have telescopes, binoculars, workshops, planetarium, observatory, a huge round trampoline, the longest rollersliding board I know of curling down the mountain, pulley rides, rope walks, lots of wooden play gyms, long grassy hills to roll down, tunnels of logs, climbing walls, climbing pyramids of cable rope, campsites, picnic sites, white water mountain stream with waterfalls, and on weekends lots of kids, and lots of parents more or less being kids.

I taught Kaya how to pick the best hill and then roll down it so as to achieve maximum spin, tumble, disorientation and general floposis. She caught on right away (though as yet unproven by science, floposis is likely genetic), went to higher and higher starting points, soon surpassing even a hillrolling veteran like myself who,though marginally less flexible than formerly, does not mess around when things get serious.

Then we went down the long rollerslide, she ahead; I, being heavier, had to brake myself to keep from scooping her up with my feet too often, which was fun, but being uncontrollable could get complicated, so I kept braking and drifting to the left as she threw her flipflops over the side because they slowed her down. Formidable grasp of physics, for such a new person.

I forgot I had the car keys in my hip pocket till they began to feel like an asteroid entering earth's atmosphere; then when we got back to the car for lunch the car key was missing from the ring (I pictured scouring the mountainside for the key, as in an old myth), but it had only been wrenched off the ring into the pocket by the force that ever pertains between an ass and a hard place.

Generally I followed Kaya for the afternoon, carrying her hat and sandals and other detritus-paraphernalia as she went where she wanted, visited the bronze gorilla, sat on the red mushroom seats, did some serious climbing and tumbling and all the other things 2 year-olds must do to fulfill child-time requirements. For a few hours, no adult agendas were allowed. Fascinating to be a true part of it and thus reinhabit my own two-year-oldness, which I was surprised to find was still there and fully accessible. Nice to know that in a very real way we stay two years old all our lives, and can go there again and play.