Like Sands Through The Hourglass

So are the days of our lives

Monday has inevitably returned.

At the playground, the Parks Department maintenance crew is preparing the space after a weekend of abuse for another week of torture. Each corner of this space has seen a million tantrums and spilled Goldfish and that kid who plays a little too rough. The resilience of the rubber has been tested for war, but still strains under the weight of childhood exuberance. The paint on the monkey bars is fading and the slide is losing its slippery luster. The sandbox nears empty as the children have transported its contents across the four corners of this prison of play via an assortment of toy trucks, little shovels, and tucked into the cuffs of tiny pants.  

A broken fire truck lies on a bench. Its wheels were violently removed in a head-on collision with the terrible twos. The will of its battery is still forceful enough to emit a dull “wee-yoo, wee-yoo”, but its flashing lights have been decapitated and lie in a pile of sand and empty squeezie containers on the ground. The park’s flag stands at half-mast out of respect for the fallen. A factory in China gets notice and increases production. 

At this hour, just after school drop off and before the 10am, pre-nap rush, the playground is quiet. Just a few babies and toddlers milling about, mostly engaged in independent play while grabbing toys out of each other’s hands. Rather than let the kids duke it out, each theft is met with swift intervention by a fully grown person. 

“Beckett, no! We don’t do that! No! No! No!” says the parent who is overcompensating after watching a parent guide’s latest post on discipline.

“Jasper, remember that we don’t believe in ownership in this family. Please give your toys to the little boy.” says the mother who reads Marxist zines on parenting.

“Oh, come on, Maybel!!” says a caretaker with no strength left to discipline or remind or educate.

And, all the kids, regardless of their parent’s philosophy, stare at their big people with a look that is half complaint and half if you ever fuck with me again, I will destroy the one precious hour of “you time” that you have naively reserved each week for yoga.

An adorable Cold War returns.

Kids get back to play and parents and nannies shelter into their phones, pushing the limits of the World Wide Web. Each adult, a sore thumbed-explorer trying to determine if the Internet, on which we now all reside, is flat or round. A child chases a pigeon as another races down the slide. The adults chase the clicks and race down the rabbit hole of social media.  

Around us, the Parks Department staff tidies the space. A young woman walks around with a garbage bag and an enormous set of tweezers plucking up detritus. She’s listening to music on a pair of United Airlines headphones, the ones from the mid-aughts that rest atop your skull. She sways her broom to the rhythm of gospel and occasionally sings along in a mellifluous voice. Moving between picking up after a piñata birthday party and the magnanimous parent who brought 10,000 water balloons without regard to the endless shrapnel. 

She sweeps the space, stopping occasionally to take a deep exhale of frustration and to look towards the sky with a “Lord, help me!” as she finds another terrible mess left by a child, and allowed to remain by her caretaker. Somehow the dog park is more tidy and appreciated by its owners. An empathetic take might suggest this is due to endless sleep deprivation of parenthood and a belief that it takes a village to clean my kids' mess. A less generous view aligns with the endless entitlement of life here.

Across the playground, another Parks Department employee, an older man, moves with no urgency. His task involves sweeping up the sand that has blown across this arid continent of joy - it’s on a distant slide and stuck in every seam. His is an impossible task as most of the sand is commingled with fallen leaves, soiled band-aids, and sticky lollipops. The man moves with the slow and deliberate speed of an unsupervised, union-proud government employee given a Sisyphean task and counting the hours until retirement. He is less of a cleaner and more a curator of messes - rearranging and replacing. A career spent sweeping an entire city under a rug of concrete.

He takes a step in one direction, brushes some sand, leaves, and wrappers into a dustpan, and then takes a step in another direction to do the same. The circumference of clean is slowly expanding around him - a foot every 15 minutes. He moves steadily as a wireless speaker on his hip plays the radio. Unlike his younger colleague, he doesn’t look to the lord for counsel when he spots another pile of mess. He simply sweeps it into his dustbin and keeps moving. He’s been at it long enough to know that no deity is powerful enough to will New Yorkers, whether old or young, to clean up after themselves at the playground. Here, the lord giveth and the New Yorker throweth away on the sidewalk. 

As he goes about, sweeping and scooping, it becomes clear that his dustbin has a large hole in it. From the look of it, it’s not new, but has been there for some time as it’s covered with layers of tape that is also riddled with holes. Thus, each sweep in finds 20% escaping back out onto the sandy floor.

Garbage in, garbage out. 

The employee is unfazed and continues to sweep up tiny piles of sand stew into his porous receptacle. Again, 20% escapes. Nevertheless, he persists until the dustbin is as full as a civil servant mere months from retirement, sweeping piles of entitled people’s messes up with a broken city-issued dustbin will get. 

In one dramatic motion, he drops the broom and lifts the dustbin up in the air, turning it upside down. It hovers in space, like Michael Jordan taking off from the free throw line, and time stops. Equidistant in front of him are the sandbox, the birthplace of the mess, and a garbage can, the graveyard of the mess. As the dustbin slowly returns to the earth, its contents of sand littered with wrappers, leaves, band aids, and sticky lollipops return from whence it came - the sandbox. 

There is no filtering or sorting or disposing, just composting the detritus back into the cesspool of disease and joy that is the neighborhood pkayground. The park is now 80% less sandy, and the sandbox is now 80% more full. This is good enough for the City and those it employs to sustain childhood in the Big Apple.

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If I Can Make It There is a collection of stories about the things and people, including me, that move through New York City. A celebration of the characters who crawl through endless traffic, slog through the subways, and stroll under the shade of scaffolding.

Like our fragmented and broken transportation system, some stories race with enthusiasm to a red light and others remain hopelessly stuck behind a double-parked Mercedes with New Jersey plates and blinkers on as the driver screams over the honking, “Just hold on for a minute! I’m only stopping in for a quick dinner at Sardis.” 

And, all of these stories could occur nowhere else but the greatest city on Earth - New York Fucking City.