I Met A Bona Fide Superhero

I met a hero today.

I don’t drop words like that lightly, but sometimes you have to describe something as you see it.

I’m off Mondays. The boys aren’t back in school yet. I have this stupid biological desire to give them opportunities for fun. So Mondays are “daddy takes them to do something” days. Today, that meant Masterson Station Park. Fairly generic playground, but with the added benefit of a splash pad that — today at least — the boys wanted absolutely no part of. Whatever, kids, I coulda taken you to the Shillito Park Playground like a hundred yards from our house, but instead I drove across the city for the water, cool, y’all just play on the inferior playground.

I was sitting on a bench, watching Lucas climb one of the play structures (the idea of playgrounds is “kids go do thing, parent passively monitors”; what actually happens is “kids go do thing, insist parent pays close attention at all times”), when Jordan came up to me from the opposite side making that face. You’ve met kids — you’re probably familiar with that face. It’s the “I’m sad, I’m stressed, all of me wants to cry, but also I’m in public and want to be a big kid, so I’m fighting it with all my might.” Something had happened. Jordan was sad.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” I asked. I wanted them to have fun. Crying wasn’t that.

“I want to climb to the top of the slide but they won’t let me,” he said. He pointed out a slide structure on the opposite side. Pretty straightforward. There were steps to a landing a couple feet off the ground. A ladder to a second landing, a few feet further up. A tunnel to climb to a third landing, this one probably 12-15 feet high. Each landing had some slides coming off, rock walls and such leading up. A fairly conventional play area, all things considered. And in this particular instance, there were three little boys at the top of the highest part of the structure.

There were three of them, each probably 8 or 9 years old. Maybe 10. One of them had a Nerf-esque gun of some kind. And they were clearly bossing everyone around.

“Why won’t they let you?” I asked Jordan.

“They said 5 and a half is too small to go up there. Can you come with me?”

I walked with him back to the structure, but I explained that he didn’t need me. If he wanted to be somewhere, he could go somewhere, and no other kid could tell him no. He was a big kid and could stand up for himself.

(Yes, I would have stepped in if the need arose. But I wanted him to be his own defense first if possible.)

Jordan gave it a shot. He climbed the rock wall to the top, and the leader kid up there proved to in fact be a huge jerk.

“How old are you?”

“5 and a half!”

“That’s not allowed up here!” He didn’t push Jordan from the top of the structure, but I definitely thought he was about to. Jordan looked back to me, but I nodded at him and he went the rest of the way up.

That should have been the end of it. Jordan had won. He celebrated having “defeated” the kid. Except the kid wouldn’t let it go. He told Jordan he had to get down. He tried to point Jordan to the slides and ladders to go down. He told the kid with the Nerf gun to shoot Jordan. He and his friends had nicknames — he was “Sonic,” his second in command was “Knuckles,” the kid with the gun was “Gun Man.” (Gun Man thankfully refused to shoot Jordan.) I came very close to stepping into the situation several times, but it kept stopping just short of needing actual intervention.

At one point, Sonic’s mom came over and told him to stop, but it worked about as well as him telling Gun Man to shoot Jordan had — which is to say, not at all. Sonic alternated between ignoring his mom and openly defying her, and her recourse was to say “We’ll leave soon” and walk back about 15 feet and watch from there.

Jordan stayed up on the play structure, but Sonic was still antagonizing him. Other kids came and went. Lucas joined Jordan up there a couple times, but left again. Gun Man’s little sister was there, also with a gun, and she was less shy about using it. Knuckles made a friend as well. Over by the swings, there were a few kids, ranging from about 4 or 5 to a big kid, 12 or 13, who was the size of your average PT Cruiser. Some of these kids took notice of Sonic and his jerkiness, others didn’t, but really, it was Jordan, a solid year younger than Gun Man’s sister and 3-4 years younger than the rest. He was not leaving the play structure, but he was struggling to have fun as well. I continued to almost-intervene.

But then, our hero arrived.

I noticed a new arrival to the play structure. The PT Cruiser kid had arrived. He was moving slowly, deliberately. He was very calm. He climbed the ladder opposite the tunnel to the top of the structure. He climbed to the top, where Sonic was emerging from the tunnel. Sonic went into his normal questions:

“How old are you?!” he said aggressively, exactly as aggressively as he had to all the other kids, generally younger than him. It usually worked. It did not this time.

“Older than you,” PT Cruiser said with absolutely no affect. Towered over Sonic, no emotion in his face or voice.

This phased Sonic. No one had stood up to him to this point beyond Jordan staying atop the structure and being shy. This was in-your-face defiance.

But he rallied. “Okay!” he said. “You can come up! But the younger kids can’t.”

PT Cruiser showed no emotion. “Anyone can come up,” he said.

Sonic was perplexed. “Yeah,” he said, but he was flailing. “Yeah, but not…”

PT Cruiser gave the faintest shake of his head. “Anyone. Can come. Up,” he said.

Sonic looked at him a little longer. He was clearly considering what his next move was, but eventually he realized he didn’t actually have one. He nodded. He climbed back down the tunnel to the second section.

Unmoving, PT Cruiser watched him climb down. He saw Sonic get to the level, watched as he started playing with Knuckles there, stayed until it seemed clear he wasn’t going to try to defend “his” territory again. He turned, where Jordan was staring straight up at him in awe, and without another word, he climbed down one run of the ladder, jumped the rest of the way, and walked off to the far end of the playground so deliberately that I couldn’t even praise his defense of my son.

Sonic and Knuckles left with their mom a few minutes later. Jordan played atop the slide for another few minutes, but with the antagonists gone he lost interest. Within a few minutes, PT Cruiser had disappeared from sight, which I wouldn’t have thought possible given he was the size of a rhinoceros.

He was a character from a movie. He swooped in, saved the day, and disappeared as quickly as he had come. No names, no history. Just the hero we needed in that moment, sent in to keep the peace and vanish.

But I feel compelled to tell his story.