The Economy

My wife’s predilection for lighting fires at the first hint of cold weather was passed down from her father, who would rub his hands gleefully and begin the preparations for a log on the hearth as soon at the thermometer, affixed to the outside of his kitchen window, dropped below forty degrees. The condominium in which we are now living does not have a fireplace and my wife must content herself with turning the up the thermostat until the rooms begin to take on the hot fragrant feeling of a convalescent center. On Sunday, in order to escape the sweaty confines of the house, I took my son to the park. As he is only two it is sometimes difficult to keep him focused. By the time we’d gotten into our coats and I’d packed his bag with diapers and snacks he’d already forgotten our destination. As we were going along the sidewalk he decided that sitting on the curb and waving at the passing motorists would be a much more agreeable use of our time. I managed to get him into the car by dint of outrageous lies about space men and plumy-tailed dogs in need of rescue. As we were driving the short distance to the park he repeated several times, perhaps to establish it in his mind, that we were:
“Going to the park. Not with mommy. Just the boys.”
“That’s right.”
“Going to the park.
“Right.”
The day was brilliant and blustery, with small thin clouds blowing fast across the face of the sun. Despite the cold, the park was full; a group of families had set up plastic coolers on one of the picnic tables and the adults huddled together, eating, while the children screamed and shot baskets on the cement court. The high winds had discouraged all the tennis players and these courts stood empty, nets billowing in the gusts, but the swings were nearly full and the slides were sporadically traversed by shouting children. My son stood, arms hanging stiffly in his puffy jacket, and watched two older girls go backward down his favorite slide, giggling as they collapsed into the sand. They shot him quick pitiless glances but did not halt their play to ask him to join. I encouraged my son to mount the ladder to the slide but he only stood mutely and shook his head as if to throw off my voice. After he’d stood there for some time he looked up and said, “I want to go swing.”
“I thought you wanted to slide,” I said.
“No, no, no. No slide.” He swung his arms and cast anxious glances between the swings and the little girls who were now executing a tandem backward maneuver that left the first girl trapped and giggling at the end of the slide while the second crawled over her to plop into the sand.
We went to the swings. The more advanced swings were constructed with a black plastic band held between two chains. There was a long row of these, mostly occupied by children whose shrieks and vigorous arcs seemed reverberate in the cold air and then, further on, a row of swings that were shaped like little buckets with holes in the bottom through which a child could thrust its legs.
“Which one do you want?” I said.
“I want the buckets,” my son said, and then added, “I’m just a little boy.”
The bucket swings stood in the shadow of some gnarled oak trees. It was colder there. I zipped my jacket up against the wind. I pushed my son, increasing the thrust when he said, “I want to go high, daddy.”
At the end our little row was another father was pushing a little boy. The father wore a bright yellow sweatshirt with “Sea Rescue” printed on the chest in sober black letters. The hood was pulled over his shaved brown head and his face, prematurely wizened and fixed in a sympathetic and skeptical grimace, peered out at a tall man in a black coat. They were talking about the economy. The man in the black coat, hands trust into pockets, nodded his head as he expounded on credit cycles and population growth and the benefits of solar power. He had an avuncular air which the man in the yellow sweatshirt seemed to vaguely resent but which he tolerated due to the gravity of the subject.
“I teach gym and rescue, and I am part time on the fire department,” the man in yellow finally interjected, his thick eyebrows going up. “So I could be on the chopping block but I don’t think so.”
“Nobody is safe,” the taller man said, leaning against the metal support of the swing set. “But your employment portfolio, as it were, is diversified, so that’s good.”
The smaller fellow nodded and let his eyes drift to the tossing canopy of oak branches. ‘I just wish I was full time, then I’d be safe.”
“Nobody is safe.”
“I’m just not going to worry about it. What can I do?”
“Nothing,” the taller man said. “Nothing to be done.”
The man in the yellow sweatshirt nodded thoughtfully and then, putting a finger over one of his arched nostrils, he blew forcefully. With a small pop a tan wad of mucus was expelled from his unplugged nostril and made a small rustling sound as it struck the oak leaves near the tall man’s foot.
My son, perhaps sensing my gaze, looked down the row of swings and, seeing the little boy being pushed by the man in the yellow sweatshirt, said, “Look, that boy is in a bucket swing too, daddy.”
I affirmed that this was true. My son seemed to feel better. I hadn’t known that all along he’d been suffering his own mild anxiety over his choice of the bucket swings and, without any idea how to ease his mind on this subject I stopped his swing and made him submit to a hug.
Later the slides were abandoned by the screaming horde; their parents packed up the coolers while the children swirled about the cars until they were slowly absorbed and driven away. Then my son went over and spent some time climbing and sliding on his own. When he was halfway down the slide he would thrust his arms tentatively in the air and then drop them quickly to touch the plastic rails. I thought about those men, talking about the economy. They were afraid just like everyone. Our little family had perhaps been lucky so far but we were saddled with crushing debt. The first two houses in which we’d lived had fireplaces but in order to service our debt we’d moved into a condominium with no fireplace and now my wife turned up the heat. She was grateful to have a place to live but she was suffering because she was disconnected now from her father, who had passed away. She connected to him through these little rituals and those rituals were being taken away. I thought about my son’s anxiety over his choice of the bucket swing. And it seemed to me in that windswept afternoon that I knew my wife and son intimately and I thought that sorrow allows us to touch, if only for a moment, the inner life of another.