Random post

They used to have one of those merry-go-rounds, or roundabouts (or "spinny things," as I like to call them) at the playground by our house in California. They are made of metal and have five or six arches that go out from the middle to the perimeter so that kids can all pile on, grab a bar and hold on for dear life while other kids spin the structure as fast as they can. If you sat at the outside of it and you weren't strong enough, you were often flung off about 5 feet onto the concrete pavement, so I always put myself directly in the middle of it. Much less scary, but just as nauseating. I used to see them a lot when I was a kid but they aren't around much anymore, and in today's blog post, I will illuminate why.

Every single time as a child or an adult when I encountered one of those merry-go-rounds, someone got hurt. Usually it was because some 10-year-old boys would come along and push the thing with the purpose of flinging as many kids off it as they could. But even if there weren't rowdy boys there, a kid always fell off or banged his head on a metal bar because the structure started moving before he was ready or got pushed because someone else wanted his space.

That structure was a menace when Ellie was little, because she desperately wanted to play on it but she was guaranteed to get hurt if she did, so I spent most of the playtime steering her away from it. All the moms of toddlers hated that thing.

One day, I was standing next to the merry-go-round, on guard in case Ellie decided to play on it, when a mom and her kids came to the park. One of the kids was a 9- or 10-year-old boy who was riding his bicycle. I watched him as he rode it around the pavement, steering around the people and structures and standing up on the pedals as he rode. After a little while, he noticed that I was watching him. I could see in his face that he knew he had an audience and wanted to do something cool.

He rode past me and briefly looked me right in the eye before he turned and pulled his front wheel up to pop a wheelie. Except he launched himself up instead of the bike and his back wheel slid out and he went up and over the handlebars head first. And he did this in front of the merry-go-round, so instead of landing on his hands on the ground, he landed on his forehead directly on the metal edge of the structure. It gauged a hole right on the bridge of his nose.

I helped him up, but he ran away from me and over to the bench, so I flagged his mom down and she gathered her other kids and said it was a good thing they could walk to his doctor's office from there. I'm sure he went to the hospital and I'm sure he needed at least a few stitches.

Weeks later, they took the structure out of the playground. I'll bet that mom complained about it and I'll bet she was the last of a thousand moms to complain and they finally said enough is enough. I was happy that they took that thing out, though I do have mixed feelings about this drive to make parks so safe that they aren't fun anymore. Everything is padded and not very high up and marked with signs to say that it's for kids over 5 years old, etc. Parks just aren't as thrilling when there's no threat of an emergency room visit every time you go.