On the way to the playground there was a ditch. A country kid could have as much fun in a ditch as on a playground, sometimes even more. The ditch was just about as deep as we were tall and the sides sloped to a clear water brook that ran year-round except during the most dry droughts and I am not sure you can even call it a brook, more a rivulet, or wet spot, except if you took the time to study it, you could discern a flow, a movement in the water, a tiny piece of leaf moving around the root of grass.
And we did study it, in great detail, but mostly we were looking for frogs. We left my grandmother’s backdoor in a great hurry and down the stoop steps and across the wide, green yard of grass, fueled by a slab of her homemade white bread smeared with butter and her red raspberry jam. The raspberries grew on a metal trellis in the tidy enclave behind the machine shop where Gramp planted his small summer garden. They were not for eating, they were for jam, and I am sure Gramp welded the trellis like he did the one for the neighbor’s gooseberries, Mrs., oh, I don’t know, but they were German or Czech, with thick accents, and she was a cheek pincher which I found revolting and I never liked her gooseberries much either, but she was friends with Gram and so required tolerance.

As we approached the ditch, we slowed down and entered, almost involuntarily, into an envelope of childhood stealthiness and observation and hunting. We were soon on our knees and inching forward and we knew our species too, like green frog, or leopard frog, peeper, or – not likely to be found in our ditch today – bullfrogs. The idea was to move as slowly as possible, once spotted, and move your hand out over the frog like trying to kill a fly on your leg and swoop down with the cup of your hand. We were pretty good at it and usually held something after the swoop, but often they jumped early, like the fly on your leg, and the frog plopped into the water of the rivulet. It must be an evolutionary survival technique similar to the one used by squirrels who change their direction on a dime (an evolution which took place before the invention of the car wheel and might need rethinking), but the frogs would use their disappearance to their immediate advantage and change course at the bottom of the water and resurface almost immediately at the edge of the brook, their bodies under water and their nose behind a clump of grass. It is not until the second miss that a frog is likely to go down and stay down. By the second miss they might have assumed they were dealing with an intelligence greater than their own, even though that might not necessarily have been true. I’m not sure why we caught frogs. Only one of our friends had that sort of terrarium and he had plenty, but I know it was not to torture them. I know this because, later in life, when I actually did meet kids who tortured them – and I will not describe what I saw them do – my revulsion matched my helplessness, helpless other than to promise to myself that no matter what may come in the future, this person will never be a friend of mine, ever, nor would I ever forget him, nor have I.

Once we tired of the frogs and our knees were good and soaked, we crossed Schipps Lane to the small playground on the edge of the ballfield. It is not there now, but there was an implement of childhood torture near the swings called, with sinister invite, a “Merry-go-round”. This particular type of merry-go-round was so simple in its design that ten to fifteen kids could get sick on it all together, all at the same time. And yet, if it was just one kid, he could get himself completely sick all by himself by just running and jumping on or, even more simply, propelling himself with one leg while hanging on for dear life to one of the handlebars like found in a subway car. The merry-go-round was a simple wooden platform that spun around a needle in the center like a plate spinning on a rod in a circus act. It was pure science and way above our pay grade. The merry-go-round was like a combination of physics and telemetry, and I think after they signed up all the astronauts they thought they might need, the adults got rid of them all, nationwide, simultaneously. It was like a purge, or the removal of Confederate statues, you know, like a big adult mistake was corrected through a new level of collective consciousness.

I mean this was pre-skateboard and we loved that thing. It could fling you off ten feet in the air, or you could just hang on if someone was running and pushing it, you hang on so long at such a high speed of spin that once you got off, you walked sideways like that first time you got drunk, really drunk, and we staggered across the tarmac of Schipps Lane and landed downhill in the ditch with our heads near the frogs.