| | suffer the children
I took a summer job as a maintenance guy at playground in
the neighborhood. I'm still working there and its November thanks to some sort
of glitch in the city's excessively glitchy computers. The playground bears the
name of three children of Irish-American immigrants who died fighting a war on
the continent their parents tried to escape.
I spend most of my time there picking up plastic water
bottles and the leftover tobacco from freshly carved blunts, or painting over
vandalism, the kind of scribbled hatred that makes thirteen-year-olds feel
strong.
One night I was there taking the trash to the corner while
some playground all-stars were having a spontaneous dunk competition on our
less-than-10 ft. goal. When they were finished, they slowly scattered in a
smattering of random insults and plans for when they would meet again. One of
the young men, while chatting over his shoulder, pulled down his mesh shorts,
and began to piss on the side of the court. "Excuse me..." I called
out, "I have a key to the bathroom." While being sure to take the
time to fully relieve himself he responded. "Man, this is North
Philadelphia. Know where you're at."
And I tell you that story so that you know were I'm at.
A couple of weeks ago, an artist who lives in the community
finalized a project she had been working on for months. It is a
larger-than-life sculpture that proudly displays the nickname of the
playground, "Pop's", surrounded by giant flowers, and
disproportionately larger hummingbirds. The brilliant flowers, of all colors,
so long as it starts with "bright", are made from used laundry
detergent bottles, the leaves and hummingbirds, from corrugated plastic signs
that used to declare what type of cloned corn seed was used what particular
field. Everything except the paint was reclaimed from the vast amounts of waste
that is buried or burned every day.
While this might all sound a bit kitsch, the piece was never
meant to hang from the walls of a gallery. It will never be shown in any art
periodicals. In fact, the only people who will ever really see it, are the kids
who threaten to tear it down, or the occasional couple whose domestic dispute
spills out into the playground yard. But if those kid's threats are ever
realized, and the giants birds do come down, they will descend like the holy
dove, and everyone should listen to hear if a voice declares who the true sons
and daughters of God are, because I have a feeling they play there all the
time.
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