Not It

I was sitting at the local park, watching my children one Friday afternoon immediately after school; because it was Friday, the children were joyful, and very active, and it was a beautiful day to be out there swinging on the bars, going down the slide, and doing things kids do. Various parents were on the benches around the outside of the play area, myself included. I was still processing an accident I had seen earlier in the day, which I had come upon while out driving; I had called 9-1-1, and the police had come and asked me a number of questions about what I had seen, but I hadn't seen much and I ended up a little set on edge by the officer's attitude. His attitude, it seemed to me, was that I shouldn't call if I hadn't seen enough of it to really help him figure out what had happened. My attitude was, you don't say what you saw, unless you're sure that's what you saw.

Now this park has a walkway around the play structures, and trees around the edges, and the play structures are set on sand so that kids falling off of them are more likely to be ok. There was a variety of children, ranging from five to about eleven, and they were all tearing around screaming shrilly; my two children, ages nine and six, were involved with a couple others and were yelling "one-two-three not-it!" which, as I understand it, is designed to make one of them "it" so they can start a game of tag. Now they all enjoy tag, pretty much, except that the youngest ones sometimes spend more time as "it" and have a harder time catching the older ones. But this game, "one-two-three not-it," which I'm sure the reader may have encountered, requires everyone's permission, and basically assigns you to be "it" if you are the last to say "not-it." If you just claim that the whole process is unfair, however, because you didn't hear it, or because the speaker of course knows when it will happen, then what can they do? They don't have an "it" until someone agrees to be "it." And sometimes that means they don't have an "it."

Now out of the corner of my eye I saw a kind of creepy man who had advanced upon a young boy, about eight or nine, and kind of had him cornered in a creepy way. It's not that there were corners anywhere, there weren't; it was all out in the open, though over in the edge of the park. The man appeared to be trying to get the boy to go with him, perhaps to a car, or somewhere, without forcing him to do it or making it appear that he was taking the boy against his will. The boy, fortunately, had some sense that this was not a good idea, but was beginning to buckle under the pressure, it appeared; it was hard to say what they were saying, because it was over on the edge of the park. This upset me and I began watching them, but my attention was pulled back to my own children.

That is because one of the other children, one of the ones who was not mine, so to speak, became upset about the outcome of "one-two-three not-it" and began pushing my kid, and calling him names, and this looked like it was going to require some intervention. I shifted on my bench to see if I would have to do something. One doesn't want to intervene in these things; we want the children to work it out for themselves if at all possible, but we all know sometimes there are people in this world, people who make it difficult to just work it out or just find someone who is "it" so that kids can just play the game. I am not an officiator concerning who said "not-it" last, but I know when one kid starts pushing my kid, it's already gone too far. You don't want to be "it," ok, go your own way, maybe some other kid will want to play tag. The kids maneuver around on the playground, stretching their muscles, running and screaming, and it's all a corollary of life, a little dance where good kids grow up and live their lives, and the bad kids start getting singled out, yelled at, chewed out by parents, run off from playing with certain kids, etc.  In this case I just got up, walked over by the offending kid, a scruffy mean-looking fellow, who probably got beat at home regularly, and he ran off, probably determined to get my kid again sometime later.

Now in the back of my mind was that kid across the playground: Did he buckle? Did he have parents around? Who was the creepy man? It occurred to me, in that split second or so, that that man represented every parent's eternal nightmare, the evil stranger preying upon our children. Not that I knew that for a fact; I didn't know him, didn't know the kid, didn't even know the kid's parents. I'd seen the kid before, that's all. That was enough to make me worry about him. 

I glanced in that direction and he was still there, the creepy man, desperately trying to convince the kid of something. I couldn't hear their exact words. The kid was wise to stall, I could see that. Then, to my surprise, from behind them, in two different directions, came two policemen, and they approached the man in such a way that he now was trapped. They talked to him for a while, and clearly made him show an ID. At some point the boy wandered off beneath them. Now I was sitting down again, on the bench, free to just watch them as my own children continued to play. And sure enough, after about twenty minutes, they arrested the guy, read him his rights, and took him over to the police car where they drove him away. Before they left I saw the two policemen talking to each other, and one pointed in my direction; I had no idea what that was about, and was confused momentarily, but since they did nothing except take the creepy guy away, I was left to believe they were just talking about me. It was a brief gesture, but it was clear to me anyway, as if one policeman was pointing me out to the other. Yet neither was the one I'd talked to earlier in the day.

My own children now had a lively game of tag going, and this meant that they were running quickly in front of me, going up the slide, taking stairs and play structures in leaps and bounds, and occasionally arguing about whether one had actually touched the other. This is a normal game, life as it should be, kids filling their lungs with fresh October air.  The little kid who had been the subject of the scene across the park, I lost track of; maybe he'd gone home? There were people who lived near the park who just let their kids go out into it; perhaps they would be more careful next time, or, they would never even know what had happened.

I scanned the news for anything about them finding some pedophile, but found nothing. Later, though, at home, I noticed that my phone had made an accidental call to 9-1-1, probably when I'd shifted in my seat. It was set with 9-1-1 as the top call, and had just redialed and called them right around the time of the incident. They had answered the call, no doubt, and they had pointed at me because they had known that it was I who had originated the call. If they had asked, I would have told them that it was accidental. But I'm glad they came, nevertheless. You don't want guys like that hanging around your park, preying on children. Whatever his business was, I'm glad it was intercepted.

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