Children: Barometers of ‘Normalcy’
A Personal Essay
Children have come out to play again.
Like birds in the morning, they are the best and most heartening signs of ‘normalcy.’ They play, they fight, they become friends, and then start all over again. By about 4pm, they have all wandered downstairs, into the building compound. Thankfully, almost all of them are without mobiles. Invention and imagination decide what their games are going to be.
I listen to them; their voices carry clearly up to my second floor window, and I smile with gratitude in their youth and their innocence. They are all so relieved that after their mandatory prison sentence of 18 months, they are out in the open again.
In the Park that we go for our daily walk, too, children have begun to appear. What are they doing? Running, just madly running around, like prisoners just out of gaol would revel in being out of a locked room.
And today, a young father had brought his small daughter along. She was probably two years old and she was dressed in a little lemon yellow top and lime green tracksuit, with small lace-up shoes. The Park is spacious and full of trees and birds. And more than fifty shades of green. The child was amazed and overjoyed. She was trying to run forward, then she would see a bird swooping by, and she would stop to stare. Then she would move forward again. Then she would see a slug on the ground, and squat down to examine it more closely. Then she would see people walking by, and stand up to wave at them, grinning a wide, grin, with all her eight teeth showing. “Hi!” she piped, and “Hi!” again. We remembered, with an almost physical ache in our hearts, a granddaughter we couldn’t hug or hold, growing up, across a couple of seas and continents. We smiled at the little angel and passed on.
At 4 pm, a troupe of bigger angels will frolic through the compound. The older kids, with their pretend-grown-up talk will look, with disdain, at the babies, and go on orderly walks around the compound.
Life resumes.
Life returns.
Life is good.
The Sun blazes in glory by 7 am.
Do we have ANY excuse not to be out of our house at the time, without our mobiles?
Any excuse not to breathe in fresh oxygen, and natural Vitamin D? Any excuse not to exercise bodies and clean minds of all the sick gossip and pathetic, puerile forwarded ‘jokes’ ?
Any excuse not to LIVE again, after dying slowly for 18 months?
Have a life-filled life.
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
Shoutout to Susannah MacKinnie for this unbelievably poignant piece of writing about the absence of children in playgrounds:
