I spent a couple of hours with Tony in the morning then I had lunch with Gabbiana, Fraulein N, and Doodlebug at Honey’s Sit ‘n’ Eat. When I got home from Northern Liberties the Fiendling had just woken up from a nap. For some reason it was a bad wakeup. He was sad and clingy and fussy and he somehow fell and hit his head, leaving a scrape and bruise just under his eye. Wanting to cheer him up we took him for a walk to see the pig who lives around the corner. Visiting and petting the pig improved his mood drastically, so we walked up to the playground.
It was a little before six and the playground was packed. An obese woman wearing short shorts sat on a bench with her husband while their tow-headed little girl wearing a blue dress, ruffled ankle socks and sparkly pink shoes played with a dark skinned boy whose mom watched from the low wall encircling the playground. A mom with a girl who was about a year old pushed her in the baby swing while smoking a cigarette. A little boy a few months older than the Fiendling was running around with his dad, a guy about my age who had tattoos covering the majority of one leg (do they still call it a sleeve when it’s on a leg?) and a tattoo of a rose on the other leg.
The little boy went down the slide and his dad followed. An eighth of pot wrapped in a sandwich bag fell out of the dad’s pocket and landed underneath the slide. The dad hopped off of the slide, scooped up the bag and shoved it back in his pocket. I stared at him for a minute, wondering if he’d acknowledge that I’d just totally seen his bag of weed. He didn’t. Instead he reached in his pocket, pulled out a few more bags in addition to the first and put them in a different pocket on the leg of his shorts, a pocket that closed with velcro.
A family shuffled up the walkway to the playground. There were two mildly retarded looking adults, a man and a woman, with a boy who looked to be about six or seven years old and a small baby in a carriage. The boy took off playing and the woman and the man sat on the bench with the stroller in front of them. The woman was oddly obese. She wasn’t nearly as large as the woman with the little girl in tap shoes, but she had a lumpy pendulous belly and she was wearing a bizarre cotton tie dyed overall shorts thing. She wasn’t wearing a shirt. The ill-fitting overalls only partially covered her stretched out, shiny white bra and back fat. She and the guy settled onto the bench and immediately took out their cell phones. It looked like they were playing games with them, and every so often they’d show each other something on the phone. The woman smiled at the Fiendling and asked me his age. I told her he’s almost a year and a half and she responded that her baby would be five months old tomorrow. I smiled and winced while she exhaled cigarette smoke into her baby’s carriage. A few minutes later she asked, “How do you spell minutes?” I spelled it for her and she thanked me and went back to pressing buttons on her phone.
A normal looking guy wearing an orange polo shirt arrived with his son who appeared to be about four or five. The dad said to his kid, “You’re one of the big kids here today, watch out for the little ones.” A few minutes later I turned around and saw that the dad was on his back on the ground, legs up on the low wall, doing sit ups. Sit ups. At the playground. He and his son didn’t stay for too long.
The Fiendling was walking around the perimeter of the playground when a little girl of about two came into the playground with her mom and they sat on a bench together. The mom looked a bit crunchy and was wearing a shirt that said something about Darwin. The little girl wanted to play with the Fiendling and kept yelling, “Come here little boy. Come play.” Eventually the girl got up and she and the Fiendling began to play, climbing up the ladder and going down the slide.
A blonde woman smoking a cigarette and a white guy with a stocking on his head walked in to the play area and sat with the obese woman wearing the bra instead of a shirt. They talked for a couple of minutes then the obese woman and the guy she was with left, leaving the older boy and the baby with the blonde and the guy with the do rag.
The little girl wearing the ruffled socks and fancy shoes came over and seemed to want to play too. She stepped up onto the wall and yelled, “Look at me! Look! I can balance while I walk! WATCH ME!” I said, “I’m watching,” and she began to walk on it like a balance beam. Every few minutes she’d yell again for us to watch. She eventually got bored of the balance routine and started climbing up the slide while the Fiendling and the other little girl tried to go down. I kept telling her that she had to wait for the kids to come down before she climbed up. Her mother and father sat on the bench at the far side of the playground and didn’t seem to be paying any attention whatsoever. On her way up the slide she announced that her shoes had very high heels. When she reached the top she showed me just how high they were and slid back down. She sat at the foot of the slide and asked the Fiendling if he’d like to sit with her. He sat and she pointed out her shoes to him. He seemed to like the sparkles and touched them. He soon lost interest and began climbing the ladder again. Wanting more attention the girl stopped him at the bottom of the slide and asked if he wanted to sit and pet her shoes. I was relieved that he did not.
It was close to seven at this point and the Fiendling was exhausted. Not wanting to upset him by leaving the playground Boyfiend waited for the exact right moment and scooped him up and skipped down the hill singing a little song. We sang the song about the marching ants all the way to the supermarket where we bought a loaf of Le Bus bread before heading home to feed the Fiendling and put him to bed.
Boyfiend put the baby to sleep while I made a quick tomato sauce (over white beans for me and spaghetti for him) for dinner. I went outside to pick some basil and found this on the ground.
Stupid raccoons. I guess it’s time to break out more coyote urine.
Because I saw it over at