Medlock Park

I’m new to Atlanta, and I have no idea where I’m driving most of the time. But, today, I had a plan for my little girl Tallulah after I picked her up from school. I’d driven by a vast park on the way to the grocery store recently, and I knew she’d love it. I had the directions in my head, and so getting there was no problem. 

For most instances, if I don’t have something written down or on the iPhone telling me exactly where to go, I’ll get lost. I don’t have much of a memory and even less a sense of direction.

We got the park around dusk. Tallulah wore this new hat she’d bought with her mom the other day at the massive REI Store off 85-South. The hat is pink, with multi-colored dots, and it has extensive ear flaps. She looks ludicrous in the hat, somehow like an eccentric bag lady.

We did the swings for a while. There was a woman pushing her tiny kid right next to us. This kid was stuffed into his clothes so much we couldn’t tell if it was a boy or girl. This kid’s hat made Tallulah’s hat look like a beanie. The hat had about four layers to it, various forms of wool and nylon and moose. Never mind it was fifty degrees.

The whole time on the swing, the mother said only one word: doggie. I couldn’t see a dog any where, and I wasn’t up for small talk. But we were there beside her for a good twenty minutes, and the whole time, it was doggie, doggie, doggie. I wanted to throw in “kitty” but I restrained myself.

When we left, Tallulah asked me about it, and I told her that the woman only knew one word, which was probably not the right thing to say, but it was funny to imagine a person knowing only one word and then passing it on to her child. You’d think it would be a bigger word with more possible meanings, or maybe doggie, depending on the inflection, could have hundreds of different meanings.

Tallulah crawled around on this arabesque plastic marvel of a playscape. She was the only kid now, but no matter. She insisted on playing by herself, some kind of elaborate pirate game, and I took this as a good sign. You have to let them imagine and build their own minds.

In the middle of the playing, however, Tallulah had to use the bathroom. It’s usually at an urgent stage when they can’t walk and they’re walking with their knees are bent at forty-five degree angles. I felt we lucked out because I saw a bathroom in the brick building next to a Little League baseball diamond. We got inside without incident, but the place was a mess. Only one of the four toilets was not overflowing and discolored. I managed to suspend Tallulah over a toilet without her skin actually touching the seat. Tallulah held her hand over her mouth the entire time.

As we were driving home, through some back neighborhood roads, I realized that for the first time in a while, I knew where I was. We were not lost, not even a little. Tallulah was singing some song to herself in the car seat, and then, she’d bring up the stinky bathroom and giggle. I drove slowly, carefully. There were Moms pushing strollers, and there were men with leaf-blowers, and there were joggers out, and they wore reflectors, the luminous strips glowing like warnings in the deepening darkness.