Ridgecrest has 3 parks with playground equipment, and they're all nice enough, but only one, Leroy Jackson, has much shade -- which is crucial. It's a big green park, lots of trees, nice playground for kids. We bring cookies and water, a bag of sand toys, our hats. Sometimes a book for Mom, though I rarely get to read more than a page or two.
I push the boos in their stroller from the car to the playground -- it's not that they can't walk the distance, it's that I'm afraid they'll run away from me, run into the street, run into the arms of a registered sex offender, that kind of thing. There are often odd characters sitting here and there in the park. I keep my eye on them.
We set up shop next to a bench with some shade. I get out the sand toys and the cookies. Sometimes, if there are younger children around, one or two of them will come up and try to take our sand toys or cookies. I don't let them take the cookies, because I figure their moms should decide what they eat, not me. But I let sand toy distribution work itself out. Baby A tends to be very possessive: "Dat mine!" he says fiercely to a tottering one-year-old reaching for our toy bulldozer. But if he doesn't notice, I'll tell the child "Yes, you can borrow that."
I notice that some moms are very careful about this. They watch their kids and if one picks up our shovel, they're over there in a flash: "No no Logan, that's not yours, your shovel is over here." Other moms pay absolutely no attention. The other day a little girl (maybe 3 or 4) came over to us and gathered up all our sand toys, both buckets, both shovels -- and then came back for the bulldozer and dump truck. I watched in fascination. The mom didn't blink an eye. Eventually Baby A noticed what was going on and grabbed everything back. I'm sure he thinks I'm useless.
Today Baby A was being weird and kept getting back into the stroller (where he could best protect his cookies from any would-be thieves). But Baby B happily shoveled sand into buckets and trucks. Eventually I noticed that the cookies were being shoveled along with the sand, so I threw them all away.
I used to feel very isolated at the park, because there are always all these church-based mom-and-baby groups there and nobody ever talks to me. But I guess I've kind of gotten used to it. I enjoy eavesdropping on the conversations, and other than that I just figure we wouldn't get along anyway so I won't worry about it. Pretty much the only people who have ever spoken to me in the park have been people who just moved to town the week before. Seriously. That's happened 2 or 3 times now.
Actually, last week a long-term resident spoke to me -- a grandma looking after her 3 grandchildren. She was quite a cheerful grandma, encouraging her grandkids to put toy cars down the slide and clapping excitedly at the cars' crash landings. I clapped too, and we put our dump truck down the slide. It was almost like socializing. But not quite.
The park is crammed full of ravens (to the boos: "ray-ray" or "ah-ah" or more recently "coh"). They are just everywhere, presumably waiting for people to leave their garbage lying around. Right now there are lots of baby ravens too -- the ones with their mouths hanging open, running after the adults. I've mentioned to the boos that those are baby ravens, but I don't think they get it, since the babies and adults are all the same size.
It feels a bit threatening, having all these ravens about, like the early scenes in a horror film. The other day some little girls were actually chasing the ravens. Of course we should not harass wildlife, but these ravens hardly count as wildlife -- they are terribly destructive to other birds, and also they eat baby tortoises -- so I cheered the girls on. They ran laughing across the grass, causing raven after raven to fly up into the trees.
The park is across the street from a fire station and the boos enjoy pointing out the fire trucks to me. We are also close to the courthouse and other buildings, so there are often police and sheriff vehicles about. Baby A loves those. "Race car!" he says to me, whenever anything goes by that looks even remotely like a police car. ("Race car" means "police car" -- I think he's actually saying "reese car" which is sort of an abbreviation for "police car.") Almost every day interesting aircraft associated with the base fly by at top speeds and the boys shout "Eh-bey!"
It's hard not to compare these days at the park with how it might have been if we'd stayed in Boulder -- or if we'd moved somewhere more congenial than Ridgecrest. Maybe I would have made a friend, maybe I'd go to the park WITH other moms who I actually KNEW and we'd sit together and talk, and ignore our children, not to mention the lonely conservative moms sitting by themselves.
But for what it is, this is OK. Which pretty much sums up my feelings about Ridgecrest these days.
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