Parents in New York City said their children are getting their feet burned while playing on blistering hot playgrounds.
When I was a child my mother used to send (not take) me to the playground. This was at the elementary school, several blocks from our house. There the miniature me could play the day away. - There was a kid-powered merry-go-round that could be made to turn at dizzying speeds, teaching us all sorts of lessons about cetripetal and centrifugal force. Much childish amusement was to be had when somebody tossed his/her/its centripetal cookies after a good centrifugal spin. Or maybe it was vice versa. If you fell, you landed on asphalt, often skidding. It was good for you. Eventually the scar tissue built up and your knees became impervious to injury.
- We had a set of steel monkey bars where we could climb perilously high, to stand up on the top rungs and hoot at the world, then hang upside down by the knees, prior to falling on our heads onto the hot asphalt. I sometimes think that experience, not drugs, is why the 60s happened.
- We had swings, too. Good ones, real wood hung on good, thick chains, from tubular steel frames set in concrete. They were indestructible swings. You could swing just as high as it was possible for your kicking little legs to take you and then, after several good swings, at the very apex of the hilarity, you could leave that wooden swing seat and sail through the air. If you were lucky you'd land on the grass covering the hard-baked July soil. If not, you hit the asphalt and your swing stood a good chance of conking you in the back of the head. That sort of thing probably explains disco.
- Perhaps most excruciating was the sliding board, a good 7- or 8-foot length length of polished steel that on a typical late July day could fry an egg before it made it all the way out of the shell. Many was the childish bottom, my own among them, that sauteed on that relatively short trip down the slide. By the time I got home from a day on the sliding board my Mom could use my butt to make gravy.
Now I look at my grandchildren and think how much they'd have liked that playground, where kids played with an absolute minimum of adult supervision. Our parents never sued the township for a few bruises. And the childish versions of us had something today's kids seldom get.
Scabs.
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The parents and their supporters said more than a dozen children are scorched each year by hot playground equipment, particularly by black mats under jungle gyms and sliding boards. They said the city is ignoring a public health and safety issue.
| Poor widdle beppies. We used to laugh at the brats that blubbered after an itty-bitty fall from the top of a 7-foot jungle gym onto the asphalt. |
Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said signs have been posted in playgrounds warning against going barefoot.
| "Proper footgear must be worn at all times!" |
He said his department was not going to remove the mats, calling the city's playgrounds "the safest in the world." Parks Department spokesman Jama Adams told the Daily News in Monday editions that there have been "no incidents reported" involving children being burned at playgrounds.
| That tells me the kids are tougher than the grownups are. |
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