Dylan Stafford

My son could almost reach the next plastic toadstool. He’s over two and half and we were playing at the park today. He had one hand on a pole and he was leaning out and stretching with his foot, trying to reach the next step. Our little town took out a perfectly good plastic fort and replaced it with a new plastic contraption. The only difference I can see is that the new plastic contraption seems to allow children to fall to the woodchips from higher heights. I’m not sure this is the best example of our tax dollars at work.

“Daddy, grab my hand.” Jack demanded.

It isn’t really a demand because it is still so sweet. He’s still a little boy. He hasn’t learned much brat behavior yet. I’m sure that will come but for now when he is annoying it is because he is hungry or tired or frustrated. He is too young to have learned about vengefulness and all those higher-level manipulations.

“Jack, you can do it.” I replied. Why does everything have to be affirmative? I thought to myself. It isn’t going to kill him to fail at some basic playground balancing opportunity. He’s not going to not go to college because I don’t give him an attaboy.

“Daddy, grab my hand.” Jack repeated. He could care less about my affirmations. The shortest distance between two points is getting mommy or daddy to lift you–Everybody knows that basic truth.

I stuck out my finger and he grabbed it and I pulled him across to the next toadstool.

It is a Tuesday in January in southern California. That means we are almost hot now at 10:30am while the rest of the country is experiencing all kinds of extreme weather events. So darn hard to get people serious about global warming when it’s January and the heavens are dumping blizzards.

Jack is home sick today. He’s got a cough that sounds like he’s smoked for 20 years. At his daycare, he coughs into his elbow as they have taught him. But after a couple of days at home, like after this weekend, he seems to forget the elbow thing and sticks his nose forward and closes his eyes and coughs like the goal is to reach out and touch everyone. 

He had a fever Sunday but it ended yesterday morning. We were on the fence about whether or not to send him to school today. We opted to keep him home one more day to make sure he got another long nap and was all the way better.

This morning I drove into my office and got some work I can do from home today. The good thing about being an admission director this time of year is that there are always more applications to read. I read half of my stack over the afternoon and will read the rest after we put him to bed tonight. Right now, I want to write about this moment at the park today. In the other room, Marisa is getting his bathtime started and he is alternating between squeals of joy and dinosaur sounds. Makes me think maybe I was lying a bit when I said he doesn’t know too much brat behavior.

After the toadstools we wandered around the rest of the playground. There were lots of hispanic women tending their caucasian charges. There were some other mommies who looked like they were actually taking care of their own biological kids, Los Angeles mommies with those giant bug-sunglasses and sweatpants that say stupid things like “Juicy” across the butt. I noticed at least two grandmas, young but still grandmas, taking care of their grandkids. There was the required “older, single guy on the bench”, who doesn’t seem to have any kids and is dressed just differently enough to make me uneasy.

Jack climbed up to one of the middle landings on the plastic contraption. There were jungle gym rings for older kids to jump out and grab.

“Daddy, what’s that?”

“It’s a ring Jack. Look, you can hang on it.” I said and proceeded to dangle in the air and look at him.

“Daddy, I want to do it.”

“OK. I’ll lift you to the ring and you hold on OK?”

I put my hands around Jack’s ribs and lifted him to the purple ring. He grabbed on with both hands and I gently let go, testing to make sure he could hold his weight. He could, but he couldn’t do much else. He dangled, limp-like, the way a kitten goes limp when carried by the scruff.

My hands weren’t but an inch from him and I grabbed him up and lifted the weight off his hands.

“Daddy, do another one.”

What have I started? I thought to myself. I moved him to the next ring and he repeated the dangle. We worked our way around the circle. There were about 12 rings in all, and he got a chance to dangle from all of them. It was a question in my mind as to whether he’d get tired first or I would.

As we got to the last ring, I was looking up at his face and the sun was right behind his head. It blinded me for a minute and then I was looking at his silhouette. California can be so bright sometimes. When I first lived here in 1995, there were all these Germans transferred over with the company I worked for. They would constantly complain about “the brightness”. Being from Texas, I thought they were on crack. “The brightness”, who the hell ever heard about something like that? Heat? Yes. Humidity? Yes. But brightness? Nope, I had never even thought to notice that. Then I went and lived in Munich for three years. Munich, where in the winter you can go months and not see the son directly. After my time there I started to see how sharp a contrast it must have been for my German friends coming over to California.

The brightness today caught me off guard because I was more focused on making sure I had a good hold of Jack. It was like a flashbulb going off and it froze Jack’s face in my mind. He was dangling, his head hanging from his neck with his hands straight up by his ears holding the ring. His nose was a crusty mess only a daddy could tolerate. Should’ve brought a Kleenex, I thought. 

Normally I have a hard time on unplanned days off like this. I feel guilty that I’m supposed to be at work and it makes it hard for me to be present with Jack. Today, since I’d already driven into the office and come back home, I felt like I had “earned” the right to just be here now. I wasn’t feeling guilty. I was hanging out with Jack at the new plastic play area.

We started to get hungry and headed back for home. We saw a work crew on the cherry pickers with the mini-chainsaws giving the giant ficus trees a haircut. We spent another thirty minutes enthralled watching the branches falling to the ground.

Daddy, grab my hand. He won’t always say that. He probably won’t even say it much longer. His balance was really close on the toadstool. A tad more and he could have made the step on his own. When that happens that will be one less thing he needs from me. When was the last time I said that to my dad, Dad, grab my hand? Probably over ten years ago, on some backpacking trip in Colorado, crossing a stream and trying to stay balanced.

These moments. I get one or two of them a day if I’m lucky. I’m writing because I want to have a few of them live just a little longer.