"A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money." -- WC Fields.
Four Corners Park is hard to find. It's hard not to think that's by design. Nestled into the (super)rich area known as Shorewood Hills, Four Corners even hid itself from my GPS, probably because the wealthy own all the satellites, telecommunications companies, death rays, etc. and when I typed in "Four Corners Park Shorewood Hills" on my phone, supercomputers around the world announced that a middle class person was trying to go to a rich park.
To get to Four Corners Park, you should first be born into a wealthy family, the kind that can afford to live in a decrepit-looking house within spitting distance of Lake Mendota. The truly rich, the ones who have ridiculously large and ornate lodge-style houses with 17 stories and private docks all actually located on the lakeshore, would never go to a park in their neighborhood. They are all Sherman McCoy types who publicly would say No I'm not but privately would try sticking out their patrician chin while sending their child to a private park located on their own island in the Maldives.
Guys like me don't know where the Maldives are, so for a taste of the good life we head over to secret(ive) parks in the nice parts of town. Four Corners Park was named one of the best playgrounds in Dane County by the Isthmus 9 years ago, which was why we were headed there today: it was the closest of those playgrounds and hence the one I chose for this, the first expedition of Adventure Squad.
Like I said, Four Corners is hard to find. Shorewood Hills itself is one of those communities that's off to the side of a real city and made deliberately hard to get into and get around. Suburbs do this to discourage people from coming into them: few entrances, twisting narrow streets, and the like are meant to subtly keep rabble like us out. This feature did not generally dissuade us from driving through Shorewood Hills in the past; many a date, Sweetie and I would drive through there at sunset, to discuss how awesome the houses were (at first), then how ungodly expensive they must be (later on), then how we wouldn't even want such a house not even if you would give one to us for free and pay the property taxes (reasons for this include the need to get furniture to fill it up, and losing the boys somewhere in the house) and then finally our discussions devolved into how do we get out of here and back to our real life? To top it off, one night lost in Shorewood Hills we drove by a house that had scary yard art, weird sculptures that were probably meant to be playful or fancy or something but which (a) almost certainly were hated by their uppity neighbors who would have to see them whenever they came back from buying salmon frappe at the Whole Foods that sits directly across teh street from Shorewood Hill, and (b) which looked like witch-summoning weird piles of wood at night and made me think of the Milwaukee Witch House that was on the cover of the Violent Femmes' album and which we used to say, when we were teenagers drinking wine coolers and smoking Marlboro Lights and driving around aimlessly, was owned by a lady whose son had drowned in Lake Michigan and the sculptures were her way of calling his spirit back. (Not only is that latter part of the story not true, the house being merely owned by someone who practiced outsider art, but the house is no longer there, having been moved to Sheboygan.)
The Adventure Squad did not plan on getting lost: we had GPS, and followed it to not Four Corners Park. "Your destination is on your left," the GPS voice told us, and on our left was a chain across a path, and a slight indentation that I sort of figured was maybe to park a car? It all sat in front of a path that ran down through what would be a trestle bridge except that instead of trains it was only ever traversed by Land Rovers, Mercedes Benzes, and other cars that cost more than most people make in a year.
So we got out, over Mr Bunches' protests that we "Can't go look at parks," because I had tricked Mr Bunches and Mr F into going to look at other parks; they thought we were on our way to the pathetically-named M.Y. Dream Park in Monona, but I'd detoured without telling them.
The path led under the trestle bridge down towards the lake, which is always a big draw for Mr F because: water! and for Mr Bunches, who hopes that maybe he might be able to jump off a pier or something.
We paused for a scenic picture:
before continuing down the path to see that there was nothing down there but a rocky shore, a chain-link-fenced in picnic area, and a few boat launches or something. The day did not lend itself to jumping off a pier, either, as this is Wisconsin and so summer ended last May, slightly before it began. Today it was 64 degrees and Lake Mendota was doing its Cape Cod impersonation:
 |
| "Smile!" I told Mr Bunches, who promptly did 'The Robot'. |
The black and white makes it seem artsier, as always, but the whole scene actually did sort of look like it was in black and white anyway, almost as if the Shorewood Hills elite (who aren't really the one percent, as the 1% in Dane County live in Bishop's Bay or Maple Bluff, they're more the 3-5% over in Shorewood Hills but don't tell them that if you run into them at Whole Foods, they'll get hurt feelings) had managed to keep the riffraff from seeing color from their boat launch. After a few more scenic pictures,
we climbed back up the hill and got into our car and continued down Edgehill Drive to see if we could get to Four Corners park, and if not we were going to actually go to the (sigh) "M.Y. Dream Park."
About two blocks past the scenic boat launch, we passed a little recessed sign, really more of an indentation in the neighborhood than anything else; it had kind of a bus-stop feel to it, but I slowed down and read the sign, and realized we'd found it: Four Corners Park really did exist!
Maybe? We drove by really slowly but I couldn't see the park part of it. What it looked like was, as I said, an indent in someone's yard. Could this be the park? I wondered. I couldn't remember the Isthmus' description of it but I was pretty sure that a 10x20 flat area with a sign wouldn't make even the Isthmus' top 10 list of parks.
So I turned right and turned around in the driveway of a rich person, thereby lowering their property values by 0.00001% ("A middle class person drove here, didn't they?" future home buyers will ask, instinctively feeling the presence of a car bought on sale and used to transport generic sodas from Woodmans.)
We drove back again, looking more closely, and I caught a glimpse of what might have been a swingset through a break in the trees.
"It's Four Corners playground," I told the other Adventurers, who greeted me with silence because they were reading books about the solar system and/or trying to get out of the elaborate system of harnesses some of them must be rigged into to avoid them clambering all over the car as others of us drive.
"Should we get out?" I asked.
Silence.
I looked at the road we were on, which looked like the kind of road I couldn't park on. There were no No Parking signs that I could see, but I never trust my instincts when it comes to stuff like this, ever since I once got my car towed for (supposedly!) parking it in front of someone's driveway while I went to class back when I went to UWM. The city where I (supposedly!!) parked my car? Shorewood, in Milwaukee. Coincidence? NOTHING IS COINCIDENCE.
I figured at the very least there was probably some small sticker or something that real Shorewood Hills residents have on their cars and mine wouldn't have it. So I went up a half-block and saw a car parked in front of a house on the right side of the road. I pulled up behind it and figured if he can park here so can I, which should in no way be taken to be a demonstration of my otherwise-stellar legal reasoning skills. I don't keep them activated on Sunday afternoons.
"You parked in a bush," Mr Bunches told me.
"Can you get out?" I asked him back. He looked dubious. But he tried, and he did.
I got Mr F out, and we began walking back to Four Corners, trying to act like we totally belonged there and were just a trio of rich folks out driving someone else's middle-class car over to our neighborhood park which we paid for with our property taxes using money from our trust funds. I had on blue socks and a Captain America t-shirt. I think I pulled it off.
Have you ever gone to a park outside your neighborhood? We go to parks in other areas of cities, and even other cities, all the time. That is because the parks in our neighborhood suck. There is Baskerville Park around the corner, which is full of spiders, is practically in someone's yard, and which sits on a very busy street with only an obviously-inadequate fence in between the playground and the Road Of Death. There is the other park on the other side which has lake access but the "beach" (and this is totally serious) is a plot of sand in front of large boulders. Also that park is filled with people in campers and tents, and I am afraid of the kind of people who come to camp in Middleton, because they obviously are not camping. They are clearly transient people who drift into town to make meth and/or kill little kids who are more than 3' from their dad. I don't like to walk by them; they smell like lighter fluid and jerky.
So we have to go to other parks, and that's fine if you're in Middleton where we at least pay property taxes. Going to parks in other cities, we lose even that little bit of moral standing. I can go to a park in one of the tonier suburbs of Middleton and if someone ever singles me out and says something like Hey you don't live in this subdivision I could at least say Oh yeah well I pay property taxes plus I was busted like four times for speeding in Middleton so I've paid my dues buddy. I am always in fear, at those other neighborhood parks, that I will be picked out of the crowd and shamed into going back to my own neighborhood where black widows (probably) infest the tornado slide.
Imagine how I felt sneaking into a rich park in another city? I expected a doorman, who would ask whether I had a membership card and then sneer while I pretended to look through my (red, velcro, free from the library) wallet, only to meekly turn away. Come on boys, I would say, we'll go play at the tire fire on the dark side of town.
But there was nobody there and there also was a real park! From a small gap in the trees, Four Corners opened up into an actual park:
The first thing we came across when we came in was the honest-to-goodness metal Merry Go Round:
If you had asked me before we saw it, I'd have told you that these things were almost certainly outlawed. While we had one in the park up the street from where I lived as a kid, the only one like this I'd ever seen as an adult was in a park on the West Side of Madison. That park was so near the highway that the noise made you have to shout to be heard, and the footing was gravel, which tells you everything you need to know about that playground. Gravel? Why not sprinkle glass fragments and rusty screws over blacktop?
Four Corners had a merry-go-round, probably because all the kids' parents are third-generation descendants of the kings of industry, making enough money to have decent homeowners' and medical insurance. No large deductibles for them! The worst that would happen would be little Chauncey would have to miss a season of lacrosse. You just know all the kids in Shorewood Hills play lacrosse. It'd be just like them.
(Spoiler Alert: I know one of the kids' names from Shorewood Hills because they marked them on the walls of the park. It's not Chauncey. It is almost certainly the name of a Norse God. You'll see.)
Mr F got onto the merry go round and immediately began pushing himself around by laying on it with one arm, leaving me free to examine the rest of the park, which meant I almost immediately noticed that it was full of stuff the rich folk had left behind. There were, I would find, several lawn chairs, two hula hoops, some of those hair things girls wear that go across their head, a pair of Crocs, a pair of sunglasses, and even two towels:
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All of which gave the park (which was deserted except for us) the feel of someone's backyard, a feeling enhanced even more by the fact that the park basically was someone's backyard. Aside from that narrow entrance between the trees (which had an almost Narnian feel to it, as though a kindly lion were here to breathe on us and get rid of the chill from the Turkish Delight), the park was surrounded by the houses of the rich. They were shielded by the majestic trees and by fences, but that didn't change the feeling that we were trespassing onto their land, a feeling made more direct by the fact that some of their yards opened directly on to the park:
If that wasn't enough to give the feeling that this was really a private piece of land we were trespassing on, the shelter up near the top would have pushed it over the edge. The structure had some picnic tables in it, and some nice flower pots in front of it, but what set it apart was that on all the cornices (I am not sure what a 'cornice' is but it seemed to fit) there were handprints made in paint and names painted next to them. I saw 2008 through about 2015, each with about 15-20 names per year. When did those kids do that? They couldn't have been on a group field trip or school trip or something: this is (ostensibly) a public park: since when can school groups just deface (theoretically) public property, and do so in such a brazen way as to sign their names? No, I figured this must be the kids who live in the neighborhood. I immediately imagined fancy garden parties, the Buchanons and Gatsbys and... Eudora Weltys or whoever... gathered here, in white linen, girls' hair ribbons trailing behind them as they ran with sparklers from boys who were carrying frogs, a fire pit (there was no fire pit there but in my mind one existed) glowing, servants in jackets and shorts carrying silver trays with aperitifs (don't know what those are, the rich drink them). The sun would have set on the rest of the world but here the afterglow of sunset would pierce through the trees, as just before the evening ended all the kids put their hands into whitewash, pressing them against the wood and tracing their name, before washing their hands in a silver bucket filled with the coldest spring water...
Beautiful.
The spell was broken a bit by first the fact that the idle rich also left behind some idle trash:
and also by the fact that they named one of their kids "Loki."
You can claim that says "Luki" but Luki is a stupid name. Loki is also a stupid name but it has a history behind it. I am 100% sure that some rich person with a $750,000 house and a boat named something dumb like That's The Breakers also has a kid named Loki. "It'll set him apart from the others," one of the parents would have said, and the other would be prevented from disagreeing because the prenup wouldn't pay squat for three more years at least. I am sure of all that. DON'T RUIN THIS FOR ME.
Also, rich people apparently do weird things, and need to be reminded not to. There was a sign saying not to put sand in the bubbler, which I though was odd because the sandbox was like 30 feet away from the bubbler, and you would really have to be a devoted kid to put sand in the bubbler. Not that kids wouldn't do that, I'm sure. It's just that given that the sandbox wasn't really proximate to the bubbler, it might not have occurred to most kids -- until, that is, you put up a sign telling them not to put sand in the bubbler. NOW you have put the idea in their heads that such a thing can be done, and you've given it the allure of forbidden fruit. I honestly did not want to put sand in the bubbler and before that moment had never even considered the thought of doing so. They were just two things, sand and bubblers, that I never had juxtaposed in my mind. But the minute I saw that sign I was almost overpowered by the need to put at least a little sand in the bubbler. I am 46 years old. What do you suppose a sign like that does to a 7 year old? 7 year olds are nothing but impulses. I'm pretty sure if you opened up a 7-year-old's mind, it would just be one of those Van de Graaf generators, throwing random sparks off in odd directions: Jelly the cat! Stand on my head! The moon is scary! When you put up a sign like Don't Put Sand In The Bubbler it's like putting your hand on one, pulling all the current that way.
That was weird, that sign. Weirder was this one:
I like the pictogram. Especially because it's actually more confusing. It reads Toilets = Not sandboxes, which is the most confusing way to say Don't put sand in the toilet. (Again, I wasn't going to but I had to fight the urge not to after that.) If a kid can't read, will he or she be able to make out that inequivalency? Plus it begs the question: what else is a toilet not? And then what is a toilet? All we know is that it is not a sandbox, which must be especially confusing for kids who have a cat, as the cat's toilet is a sandbox. This would not bother kids in Shorewood Hills because while I am certain that 100% of them have a cat somewhere in the house they have almost certainly never been tasked with emptying its litter box. [Their cats are most likely a Siamese or a Manx or some other cat that is sort of like an investment. The rich don't have pets anymore than they have cars. Everything a rich person has in in some way an investment. Even cats. You know this to be true. No rich person ever got a cat from a pound. They bought a pedigreed cat with papers, and have considered possibly breeding the cat if they can find another cat of pure enough stock].
The Isthmus review 9 years ago said this:
Wrapped around the base of a tree, a small wooden stage awaits impromptu performances.
That is 100% something I can see happening here. Ordinarily the idea that neighborhood kids would put on a show is one I would find laughable. But I have no doubt that there have been miniature jazz recitals (WHAT is the deal with jazz? Can we stop pretending it's ok?) and tiny Shakespearian dramas and even the odd improv comedy routine from the 'youth' of Shorewood Hills.
The tree is no longer there; instead, in the middle of the stage is a totem pole that is probably not at all offensive to Native Americans, although none of them have ever made it far enough into Shorewood Hills to object:
That represents all the things Shorewood Hills' forefathers went to their cabins up north to hunt. According to Wikipedia,
Totem poles are not religious objects, but they do communicate important aspects of native culture.
Rather than animals, the pole should have sculpted reliefs of soccer camp, being promoted at dad's business, a set of golf clubs, a Coldplay CD, and a salmon frappe from Whole Foods.
Playground-equipment wise, the park had okay-to-good stuff. The swingset
had more than enough swings; usually you have to go to an elementary school playground to find that many swings. Plus there were two of those chair swings. Is there anything worse than having your kid waiting for the chair swing while some parent lets her kid keep going on the swing completely oblivious to the fact that my kid is waiting? NO. There is NOT. Parents: if I, specifically, am waiting for something with one of my kids, do the polite thing and clear off, will you? I got three hours' sleep last night and am at this playground because not only do I have to keep Mr F awake until bedtime and if I don't get him out of the house I never will do that, but I have to tire him out because that is the only hope I have he will sleep tonight.
Yes: that is every night. I get three hours' sleep every night. The other four hours Sweetie and I are lying in bed wondering whether it is worth it to go in there and see if Mr F has to go to the bathroom. If we don't, he will wet the bed. If we do, he will not go back to bed and one of us is going to have to take him for a ride at 3 a.m. and then stay downstairs with him the rest of the night, getting up off the couch every five minutes to make sure he closed the refrigerator door. So I hate to pull rank on you but I need that swing.
Mr F went on the swings for just a few minutes, then was back to the merry go round. By then he had taken off his shoes. Because nobody was around I didn't have to go through the token parenting I do for public consumption. Had their been someone around I'd have said "Oh, don't take your shoes off, come on put them on" before giving up. I would have done that only to not look terrible in front of another parent. I don't care if he wears his shoes unless it's a safety issue. We have to pick our battles, and clean socks is not where I choose to die.
Mr Bunches, meanwhile, had wandered over to the structure that at first I took for a truck but he immediately pegged as a school bus:
If it is a school bus, that seems mean. Hey kids here's a big reminder of that thing you hate and have to go to every day until you are 18, right smack in the middle of the playground. (Actually it's off to the side.) So these kids can't put sand in the toilet and have to stare down the end of summer every time they spin round on the merry go round. No wonder the park was deserted.
Mr Bunches sat down and asked "Can I sign The Wheels On The Bus?"
"Sure," I said.
"Can you not sing, Daddy?" he asked.
I wandered back over to the Merry Go Round, which Mr F had come back to. Throughout the day, Mr F would rarely venture far from the Merry Go Round, which posed problems for me because if you want to keep an eye on your kids in case one of them suddenly decides to run as far and as fast as he can in one direction, you don't want to be very far away from that kid. So if you are way up here
by the totem pole and Mr F/your kid is way down there, it's hard to relax and look around to find things to make fun of rich people about. Still, the road outside was far enough away, and quiet enough, and full of enough houses of rich people who were probably hidden inside their safe rooms because of this entirely unwarranted intrusion into their Shangri-La that I felt like I could be a little ways from him.
The other major attractions at Four Corners were the 'play structure' which sounds like a lame New Age way to refer to things but I guess is just a functional description, and the sandbox. Let's tackle the latter first.
The sandbox in Baskerville park, just a block or two away from us, is a travesty. It is full of bugs, for one thing: sit down in it and you instantly don't just feel like things are crawling on you. They are. Things. Crawling. Plus the sandbox is about 4' x 4', and while you may have been able to do the math and think hey 16 square feet that's still a really small area especially if other people insist on using the sandbox at the same time as you do. And they will. Other people always horn in. Other people are the worst.
The sandbox at Four Corners, on the other hand, is large and octagonal or hexagonal or somethingagonal.
"The polygonal shape will stimulate your children's minds and make them engage in more structured play," it seems likely some designer told some citizen's committee charged with deciding what to put in this park.
I'm not going to try to figure out the volume of the sandbox. It's big, and it's suitably far away from the toilets. It also had a higher quality of left-behind toys in it for public use. When did that start? Every sandbox we go to nowadays (and there aren't many) has a collection of toys left in it. These usually are pretty broken down, half-trucks and rakes with one tooth, a shovel that can't possibly function because it's tiny and bent at a 75-degree angle. (See? You're learning math! Polygons: Making Learning Possible. (TM).)
I have always wondered how those toys got there. The least possible option is that some city functionary is tasked with putting them out there in the spring, going to the city's store of confiscated beach toys or black-market trucks or something. I've always assumed that the toys are left behind by other kids, but this must be done on purpose, right? If the kid wanted to take the toy home, and forgot it, he or she would go back and get it, right? Or would get it some other day? If it was our house, he would. We have driven back home to get stuff we forgot, or driven off to find stuff that we have left places, because Mr F and Mr Bunches may be intrepid founding members of Adventure Club!! but they will not leave a toy behind.
So kids must be deliberately leaving them there. This is obviously a parental decision, because no kid ever voluntarily gives up on a toy. Toys and kids are like a band of Navy Seals. Nobody gets left behind. The single most accurate moment in Children's Film History (TM) was when Pixar showed the parents buying another Lotso Hugs Bear for that kid who left the first one behind. They obviously left the 37 hours of crying and screaming between leaving that rest stop and stopping at Wal-Mart to get another one before we all go #(%*$&# nuts okay honey! on the cutting room floor.
This proves that the commons are not always a tragedy, or possibly? Parents are convincing kids to leave their old junk at the playground for other kids to use. Economists ought to study kids, rather than talking about 'invisible hands' and 'value added taxes' and 'why I ought to stop lying on my taxes and claiming I spent $32,000 on home office supplies last year'.
The toys at Four Corners, while also left behind, are of a higher quality, as you'd expect in Little Richville. I could almost see some neighborhood Lacrosse Mom telling Heloise the Nanny to swing by and pick up some toys from "one of those stores your people go to" in order to scatter them at the park and replace last year's now-weather-damaged models.
There were actual whole trucks that appeared functional, for example:
As well as shovels and a bucket that didn't have any cracks in it, and which could be used for actually carrying or sculpting sand.
I had to resist the urge to steal them. Anytime anything is left out that might possibly be free and/or which I could potentially use, I have to resist the urge to steal it. I am the Tragedy of the Commons.
Mr Bunches spent some time in the sandbox, near the end, laboriously building a volcano, which he announced to me was in fact a volcano. In case I thought it was a hill with a hole in it. Mr F only went into the sandbox for a bit, to dump sand on himself (see above) but that was okay because there was no sign forbidding it.
Near the sandbox, hidden way at the back, and which I almost forgot about, was the 'Teeter Totter,' which Mr Bunches informed me was a See Saw. I like today's modern SeeSaws, because unlike the olden days when kids had to be more or less equal in weight, which is a constant source of shame and embarrassment if you are a ahem heavier kid like certain people who are writing this post were, your modern SeeSaw has springs that both let one kid play on it, and prevent 'Cherry Bumps,' which are where you wait until the other kid is all the way up on one end of the slide and then quickly jump off, dropping them onto their butt, hard.
The SeeSaw, Wikipedia says, takes its name from the French ci-ca, meaning "This-That". I was going to say that was dumb, because it's not a This-That, it's an up-down, but then I translated 'up-down' into French and it comes out haut-bas, and God forbid we have our kids playing on Hot Basses on playgrounds. The name Teeter Totter on the other hand is supposed to come from the Nordic language word tittermatorter, which I refuse to believe. Why would Teeter Totter, made up of two perfectly good English words, have to come from what is obviously a fake word someone put on Wikipedia?
In portions of New England, SeeSaws are referred to as "tilt boards," because those people have had all the fun bred out of them. Correct usage: "Look, Mumsy: those poor children are playing on a tilt board. *stops talking, gets onto private helicopter ."
Near Narragansett Bay, they call them "Dandle Boards," which is just gross.
The SeeSaw here was hard to use: it had seats, with safety bars, but the safety bars were very close to the seats, so if you had eaten a lot of "Zero" bars recently, you might worry that your thighs weren't going to fit in, and if you are 46 years old and have the bending capacity of an ancient oak tree, you will have a lot of trouble getting in.
Mr Bunches did okay; Mr F couldn't figure it out at first and didn't like it when I showed him. The seats are wide enough that more kids can join in than just two. (See Other People, worst, above.)
Then there was the 'play structure,' which was the crown jewel of this playground, because it had real metal slides.
In the annals of playground safety, the Consumer Products Safety Commission has generally estimated that 200,000 kids a year get hurt on playground equipment including burns from hot metal, which is why all the slides nowadays are so terrible. They're made of that plastic that never heats up, sure, but it has a coefficient of friction somewhere around the range of brick-on-hot tar.
DID YOU KNOW: The 'coeffecient of friction' is a measure of the friction between two surfaces. The lower the number, the less friction, obvs. The 'coefficient of friction' was invented by Arthur Morin, a man so important they put his name on the Eiffel Tower. On it. They clearly didn't name it after him. There are 72 names, total, on the Eiffel Tower, which is an honor I didn't know existed until I read about the coefficient of friction. The 'coefficient of friction' supposedly cannot be calculated mathematically; it can only be demonstrated through experiments. While I am all in favor of anything that reduces the amount of math I have to learn, I don't believe this one bit. It would be so easy to ascribe a measurement to a known surface, like sandpaper, and then measure everything in terms of how it relates to that standard. This is how we measure everything; it's why a "second" is measured by the frequency of radiation of a caesium atom, and why a kilogram is measured in relation to the kilogram.
DID YOU KNOW, II: The "second" is called that because it's the second division of the hour. Weird.Metal slides go fast, and these weren't even hot -- the trees helped shade them, and even I could get some speed on them although the fact that I am way too wide for your modern slides and I scrape against the sides slowed me down on the races.
The play structure also had rings and monkey bars. I always was envious of the kids who could do monkey bars. I could never get them -- I could barely do a pull-up in grade school. Back when I was a kid, too, other kids would do "penny drops," which was where they would hang from the monkey bars by their legs, then drop down onto their feet, flipping in the process. Playgrounds are an endless source of envy and humiliation for fat kids with glasses who lack any hand-eye coordination and like comic books.
The boys do not do well on rings and monkey bars: I generally have to hold them up so they can make their way across.
Mr F is not sad in that picture because of the rings. He was just having one of his periodic sad spells. Sometimes he just starts crying for no reason, and we have to try to figure out how to help him. We take him for rides, or try to play with him, or rub his head or his legs, or give him medicine in case he has a headache, or offer him cheese puffs, or... well, that's pretty much all we can do. Then he either pulls out of it sooner, or later, and we are left in the dark as to what caused it. We will debate the possible sources: did he hurt himself? Is he sick? Does he want to watch another movie? Does he want a snack? Maybe he wants to go play? Mr F has many ways of letting us know what he wants, but in the sad moments, those ways break down.
All in all, we were at Four Corners for nearly 2 hours, and never saw another soul. I heard a lady talking loudly outside the park at one point but she didn't come in, probably because the park was being used by ruffians. TRUE STORY: I just looked up the word "ruffian" to see where it comes from, only to learn that there was a horse named Ruffian that had a movie made about it in 2007. That makes like ten movies about horses that Hollywood has made. Who are all these people Hollywood thinks like horse movies? Also, when will they get around to remaking Fury for kids of this generation? That episode where Joey went blind after hitting a branch was a classic.
The quick recap, Four Corners Park: Worth the trip, but be sure to wear your monocle so you blend in.
Mr Bunches' Two Cents Worth:
Me: Did you like Four Corners park?
Mr Bunches: Yeah.
Me: What did you like about it?
Mr Bunches: It's a good one. Because the Merry Go Round is crazy, because the twins made a man overboard.* We're crazy.
*He is referring to when he and Mr F fell off the merry go round, and he hit his butt, and said Man overboard!
