Savage Park : A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die (9780544303294)

by Fusselman, Amy

  When King says he wants to play before doing his homework, what he means is that he wants the time/space to not be bothered by me. What he does in that time/space is not that important—he likes to read, draw, build, play ball, and chat with Mick. Whatever he chooses, the critical part is that he is not directed.

  He is keen to seek this unfetteredness, and his viewpoint humbles me. For all my fussing about playground aesthetics, he does not really care too much about the kind of playground he is in. If the space is padded and disinfected, fine. If it’s Savage Park, fine. The environment is not the issue. The issue is the degree to which he perceives that he is free, and for the most part, free means being left alone to do what he wants.

  Of course, what he wants is not always possible—no, you can’t punt the football in the living room—and this has made me think about his freedom, or relative lack of it, and try to think of what we can do to feel more free.

  It’s amazing to discover how difficult this is. It’s ridiculous, and the boys know it, but I have taken to calling blank sheets of paper SSOFs, or Sacred Squares of Freedom. The name came about because King had a homework assignment about the political turmoil in Egypt, and Mick was reading over King’s shoulder. Later that night I asked Mick what we should suggest as the name of his Little League baseball team, and he said, “Protesting People of Egypt.”

  “Nice,” I said. “PPOE.”

  His team is called the Neptunes.

  King’s having homework has been a hard transition for Mick, who misses being able to play with his brother after school. Frequently, when King starts his homework, Mick tries to undermine him by standing next to him and flying paper airplanes in his face or the like.

  To prevent this, I have been sitting Mick down at the SSOFs while King works. Draw whatever you want, I say. Write whatever you want.

  So far, most of the images Mick has drawn have been astronauts. And one word: poop.

  | 7 |

  It is hard to watch the Japanese struggle with their damaged nuclear reactor in what seems like such an inept way. I keep thinking this is the flipside of a culture that can create, and tolerate, the fragile/brilliant mess of Savage Park.

  I say to Frank one night: Americans would have been on that reactor like white on rice.

  | 8 |

  I have mom-friends who tell me how wrong I am about various screen-based activities for kids, how great these things are, and how creative—they use that word—their children have been in, for instance, making a really cute birthday card for Grandpa with a particular program online.

  I don’t know what to say to this in polite conversation, because when I hear things like this about creativity, I want to cry. I want to cry because my understanding of creativity is that creativity, in its fullest, most cherry-blossom-ish flowering, wants to piss on your grave.

  Creativity is like this because it is a force; it is powerful, overwhelming, fiery, and insatiable, and it cannot and should not be satisfied with arranging virtual flowers on a two-dimensional template that was structured by a greeting-card-company employee who was thinking about God knows what. Creativity wants to set fire to every greeting card you ever made. Creativity wants Grandpa to die already so it can race his Oldsmobile off the dock and into the lake.

  Creativity is like this because creativity is part destroyer, and in my limited experience, this is why real creativity does not get many party invitations.

  But this is the good thing about creativity, too: it is a party crasher. So if there is just a little, tiny space—an opening—that is enough, thank you, for creativity to find its way through.

  | 9 |

  The last night I was in the playpark, after Bailey’s Milk played; after Noriko and I had been sitting around with teenagers in the evening; after the teenagers played their songs on guitar and sang and smoked; after a young man who came to practice his moves twirled a giant, fiery baton; after we all went out to eat noodles together; after we went back to the playpark after the restaurant to get Noriko’s backpack because we’d forgotten it; after all that, we discovered that there was a serious discussion going on between one of the women who was on the playpark committee and Taka and Huta, Noriko’s play-worker assistants.

  My heart sank when we encountered this. Everything takes a long time in Japan, but serious conversations take even longer. We will never get home, I thought.

  Noriko was pretending to look for something on a shelf but I saw that she was listening intently. I glared at her.

  I. want. to. go, I said with my eyebeams.

  She ignored me.

  I heard the playpark woman saying “Mmm, mmm” to Taka. It was like hearing a mother coo to a baby underwater. An interpersonal situation was being smoothed over.

  I sat down near the door and closed my eyes, resigned.

  Noriko walked over and ushered me out of the hut. We stood on the porch.

  “I have to stay,” she whispered, “but I have my key.”

  She dangled it in front of me, looking straight in my eyes.

  “Do you know the way home?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  She gave the key to me, then turned around and padded back into the warm light of the hut.

  I turned and walked in the opposite direction, into the dark of the playpark. It was midnight. I was alone.

  I took a deep breath and smelled the playpark smell, which, in November, is the smell of leaves and dirt and water and noodles and smoke. It’s a fantastic smell, earthy and fresh.

  I walked to where I had first stood with King when the Japanese gentleman had offered us marshmallows on sticks. I looked up at the trees in the dark.

  Then I walked out of the park. I walked past the gaggle of unlocked bicycles, past the concrete, S-shaped-ravine playground, past the baseball field, past the traditional playground where we had come that very first time with Yelena and her family, and then out of Hanegi Koen altogether and into the street.

  I realized how much time I had spent on this walk not paying attention to where I was going, following Noriko blindly, chatting, as she walked her bike alongside me.

  I took the key in my right hand and held it in front of me, at arm’s length, like a divining rod.

  As I kept walking I decided to flip the key so I was holding it with the teeth up. The key became a shark at the end of my hand, a shark that was using sonar, a shark that did not need to see well to swim, a shark that was going to smell its way to the one lock in the one door in the one apartment in the one building in this big city that its teeth just perfectly fit in.

  It was a Sunday night. The streets were completely deserted. There was absolutely no sound. Tokyo was like the stage set for a city, and all the cast members had gone home.

  I did not have a cell phone. I did not have the language to use a cell phone. I did not even know, in words, Noriko’s address.

  I had never been as completely alone and lost as I was in that moment. I was hyperventilating. I tried to slow my breathing.

  I focused on my shark. My shark wanted to go up higher so he could smell better. I held him up there, over my head.

  I stopped thinking as much as I possibly could. I switched my center of operations from my brain to my gut. I listened to my shark with my gut. My gut and the shark were a team. If you drew a curved line between my shark and my gut, there was a fin of awareness between them.

  The awareness became thick, like smoke, then clear and sparkly; finally, it transformed into a sail.

  I was blown along in the dark, down the silent streets, past the small, papery houses, under the giant moon and stars. I couldn’t feel my body moving, though I heard my breathing. I was gliding.

  Finally I saw the steps of Noriko’s building. I lowered my shark and found my feet and started to think.

  I bounded up the steps gratefully, with humility, moved by the miracle that the streets of Tokyo had taken care of me, had spoken to me without language, without sound, with only vibration, as I put the
key in the lock that fit beautifully and twisted my wrist and opened the door.

  I felt the slow twirl of the world as I pulled off my boots and sat down at Noriko’s old computer and typed an incoherent love note to Frank in the e-mail text box and then sent it, with the watery wave of one finger, to the other side of the globe.

  7

  Red Butterflies

  | 1 |

  When Noriko came to visit us in New York, which was between the time when I visited her and the time she met and married Haruki, I had a party for her. It was nowhere near as fabulous as Bailey’s Milk playing in the playpark, but I invited a bunch of friends over, people I hoped Noriko would like, and we sat around and talked and everyone ate barbecue.

  Noriko was still very open about her desire to have a child, even though she hadn’t met her future husband yet and was not even entirely confident that that would ever happen.

  Noriko received a small beaded box as a gift from one of my friends. Someone joked to her that her future baby was in there.

  I watched as Noriko clutched the tiny empty box to her chest and hugged it delightedly.

  | 2 |

  I wonder if it would be possible, in our country, for great hordes of people to go to a place like Savage Park with the same ease with which we go to, say, a chain restaurant for dinner, only instead of anticipating an atmosphere that is clean, warm, and nice, instead of anticipating an engagement with the mommy in space that will present us with yummy cheddar fries and Diet Cokes and then make the dirty dishes disappear, a mommy-sphere that will keep us, in some ways, infantilized, we would anticipate a connection with a different mommy in space who is not entirely known, who is mysterious and powerful, who gets grumpy and demands respect.

  Could we, as a people, as a culture, be willing to easily and regularly face the mommy in our environment who enables our existence? Who can take it away?

  If not in a playground, where?

  If not now, when? At the moment of death? That one time? That’s it?

  | 3 |

  When I was in my twenties, before I had children, I met Ettore Sottsass Jr., the legendary architect and designer who was the founder of the Memphis design group. Sottsass, who was born in Vienna but went to school and practiced in Italy, designed everything from homes to airports to ceramic vases to, in 1969, the iconic bright red Olivetti Valentine portable typewriter, which was the Apple of its generation.

  Sottsass died on December 31, 2007, at the age of ninety.

  In my twenties, I worked at an art magazine, and I went to Milan to interview him. I had never been there before. I looked out the airplane window at the Alps as we flew over them. I was shocked at their majesty. Then I went back to fitful sleep in the overly formal outfit I had chosen to wear for the plane ride.

  In addition to all his design and architecture work, Sottsass published several books of his photographs. One, The Curious Mr. Sottsass: Photographing Design and Desire, contains a brief passage he wrote called “War.” Sottsass registered for the Italian army in World War II and spent most of the war in a Yugoslavian concentration camp.

  “There was nothing courageous or enjoyable about the ridiculous war I fought in. I learned nothing from it. It was a complete waste of time,” it begins.

  Sottsass was ill when I arrived; I was supposed to have the interview on my first day in Milan but his assistant told me no, I would have to wait until the last day of my trip, three days later, if I were even able to interview him at all.

  I was slightly hysterical about not being able to accomplish what I came for, but what could I do? I spent my time wandering around nervously, eating gelato.

  Finally, my last day there, I got the call. He could see me.

  As quickly as possible, I took a cab from my hotel to his apartment, which was in a graceful marble building downtown.

  I buzzed and was let in. His apartment was on the fifth floor. I pushed the button for the elevator but the elevator did not come.

  I couldn’t wait.

  I waited.

  I couldn’t wait.

  I ran up the steps, the five flights of white marble, with my heart flying. The thing I loved so much about Sottsass, aside from the fact that he made beautiful objects, was that he saw that the entire process of building and making was, in many ways, absurd. He made ceramics in part because they were humble and fragile. He made giant, wildly colored, seven-foot ceramic vases that cost thousands of dollars. He made a small ceramic flower vase in the shape of a pale pink penis—the Shiva vase—and, in marketing it, pasted an image of the vase onto a newspaper photo of two Italian heads of government having a meal. He was a punk of the highest order.

  He went through a whole period where he renounced architecture and design and wandered around the Italian countryside, camping and making structures out of sticks and string, which he photographed.

  He photographed constantly. He photographed doors he never opened. He photographed beds where he had just had sex. He was not a decorator and yet he was just a decorator. He had great tenderness for the ways in which people tried to make their lives more comfortable, more bearable, more beautiful.

  I don’t know what he must have thought of me, some sweaty American girl bounding up the steps to his landing, near tears. He welcomed me into his modest, elegant home.

  “What have you been doing today?” I asked him breathlessly, my first interview question. I had just hit the door. I wasn’t even holding a pen yet.

  He showed me, shyly, where he had been sitting in the dark, on the couch, watching videos of Billie Holiday. He had been drawing pictures of her mouth. He showed me the pages of his sketchbook: bright red butterflies, fluttering their wings.

  | 4 |

  When you first have a baby, after the labor, and the staying at the hospital for a couple days, and the baby in and out of the nursery getting tested, and the doctor visiting you, and the nurse checking in on you, and the monitoring and more monitoring, finally, after all that, God willing, they say okay and let you and the baby go.

  And the doctors and the nursing staff don’t say this, but it is there: You are on your own now. The baby is yours. Just don’t kill it.

  Frank and I laughed when we said this to each other: Just don’t kill the baby! And it was such a relief to laugh because of course, the baby, in so many ways, is so terrifying, and your burden, so small, eight pounds, is so gigantic. You bring this small bundle home, you are responsible for it, and it is so fragile, and you don’t know what you are doing, and you want so much for it, you have so many hopes, and now, also, you are totally screwed, because the baby may die, your baby may die in a thousand million ways, so many ways you can’t even think of them all.

  And now this is on you, the parent, to be vigilant and awake and alert and aware every second—yes, to Be Here Now every single second—to protect the baby from dying and to counterattack that harsh reality we made up as a joke: that the only way the baby would die is if we killed him, ha!

  And really, this is where there should be some moment in the hospital, some moment where you, as a new parent, take an oath. There should be a moment where you raise your right hand and repeat after the nurse: “First, do no harm,” even though that particular phrase was not actually written to apply to newborn babies and is not in fact part of the Hippocratic oath at all, as is widely assumed; it’s a paraphrase of a line that comes from the wider body of writings associated with Hippocrates. “First, do no harm” is meant to underscore the two ideas that, like the twin serpents on the caduceus staff, every medical intervention, no matter how well-meaning, carries risks, and that sometimes some people are broken in such a way that they cannot be helped.

  Yet in this respect, “First, do no harm” would be a good thing for new parents to say if they also understood it as a double-edged reminder. The oath would mean: Above all, do not hurt the child, of course. But also, do not deny the possibility that your child may be hurt beyond your ability to make her better, and, finally, do not d
o the opposite of denying the possibility, which is becoming obsessed with it. There has to be some middle ground.

  | 5 |

  Mick is very into music now and he has been playing a lot of music and as a result we have been doing a lot of dancing in our apartment lately. Everyone has his or her style. King has a lot of breakdancing and ninja moves. Katie does the toddler Frankenstein. Mick is more fluid. When he is really in a groove, he stands on top of the kid-size table and assumes a jogging posture, and then he moves really slowly, as if he were slow-motion speed skating. He inevitably does this to a really bright, fast song, and when he does it, he is always half smiling. It is a secret he is in on: the music that envelops us is fast and light, but the world each of us is in, the body, is slow and plodding.

  | 6 |

  American playgrounds that are designed to adhere to the regulations of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and that are subject to reviews by certified playground inspectors and that have instructions for uniform installment of playground equipment that are specific down to the half inch—these kinds of structures are fantasies for adults, fantastic fortress images we build to reassure ourselves that death will not happen to our children there. They are temples to that idea.

  The idea that we—and our children—are never really “safe” is hard to live with. But the good news is that we also don’t have to live with the opposite idea—that we are always “unsafe.”

  Moving beyond the dichotomy of safe/unsafe, beyond I won’t die/I am dying, where are we? For most of us, most of the time, we are in a place where we are neither totally “safe” nor “unsafe.” We are in time, in space, we are living.