By Chris McLaughlin

Near midday Wednesday and the playground is filled with young kids, maybe third grade, all celebrating their bodies, movement, the finally glorious weather. Right now they cluster, boys and girls together, negotiating rules for the game they will play, and one is put forward by consensus to direct the choosing of the teams. Teachers on the periphery watch from the corner of their eyes: no need to interfere. It’s the end of the year and this group has learned how to live together.

It is so lovely, they are so lovely in this time that mirrors my time long ago when adults were largely absent from our play lives. I want to stay and take them in I think, after I open the door to the meetinghouse, where a few of us will gather quietly for midweek worship.

But entering, turning on lights, I fall into elder ADD. Does the dishwasher need unloading? No. Where’s that resource I wanted? Ah, here. Try to copy a few pages but can’t figure out the machine. Another arrives. Shift attention to them. We are still learning this way to be together and it too is lovely.

In the silence it comes that I missed a chance to be in another happy moment, witnessing that outside busy beauty. It doesn’t obviate what the silence serves up but reminds me again to be aware of this moment now.

I need so many reminders.

Leaving, the bigger kids hold the playground. Boys slim in approaching manhood play basketball. I don’t know where the girls are: a few sit on benches in the shade. Teachers hold a sharper eye now, a ready ear to step forward when the trash talking goes too far. They don’t have to say anything today. The boys know and focus on the ball, the basket: from the corner of their eyes or some other noticing system athletes use they watch each other.

They too have learned to live together. For now. May the lesson hold throughout uneasy summertime away from school.

Mary and Guy have gone to the garden. They bend to attend to beans or peas. For a moment I wonder about the gardens Adam and Eve made when expelled. So many wins and losses, errors and learnings, expulsions and then renewals in life.

(If Adam really lived to be 900, must have been so many gardens and so much play as well as all that work. For Eve, probably more. No mention of her age: she is her own kind of eternal, this mother metaphor.)

There is no point to this bit of writing that I know. Except to see, to remember, to think of what is constant and what changes. To pay attention, to remember that attention must be paid to the ones with us on the playground, in the schools of all the sorts we enter and leave in life.