Playground Rules

When Berliner parents take their kids to the playground, or Spielplatz, they often bring little buckets, shovels, and other sand toys. The parents plop them into the sand. The kids either play with them or run towards the more interesting swing or slides.

Other kids find the unattended sand toys and play with them. There's a sand toy social contract that says it's alright to share your toys at the Spielplatz.

My son discovered a toy dump truck at one of our local playground and started playing with it. That moment of bliss (he's going through a construction vehicle obsession phase) lasted about 10 seconds.

Another kid screamed NEEEIIIIIIN!!!!! He ran across the playground to Levi. He snatched the excavator from him and shouted Nein! once more. Levi ran crying to me. The other kids' mother tried to explain the concept of sharing to him. Not all kids grasp the sand toy social contract.

Our neighbourhood playgrounds offer endless opportunities for surreal interactions like this. 

Children in Germany are astonishingly good at lining up to await their turn on the slide. They give space to the youngsters. They won't push or shove unless someone plays with their sand toys. Then they drop the gloves.

Social distancing can also be easily described as social awkwardness, expecially around strangers. 

Kids have been picking up on this social awkwardness. I see it with Levi. He sees another kid, and he wants to play, but he stands back, cautiously. You can see the wheels turning. Should we play? Is it safe? Why wouldn't it be safe? Maybe I'll just stare from a safe distance for a little while longer...

Playgrounds are an oasis for the kids during a lockdown. But smartphones are clearly a survival tool for bored parents who visit the same Spielplatz day in, day out. I decided a while ago to stop looking at my phone when I’m out with Levi. If you try this, you will start notice how much time other parents are on their phone at the playground.

My favourite is the dad – and it’s almost always a dad – who looks at their phone and gets sucked in. They’re mesmerized and lose all track of time. Their kid – because they’re a kid and can't stay still for longer than 7.4 seconds – runs off to another end of the playground while the dad is lost in his screen.

After a few minutes, the dad looks up to where their kid was playing a few minutes ago and doesn’t see them. A bunch of expressions play out on his face. Surprise. A bit of panic. Mostly it’s that facial expression that says Oh, no, I have to tell the mother that I lost our kid because I was playing Break-a-Brick. 

There’s a frantic visual scan of the playground, but it's a subtle visual scan, because he doesn't want to make a scene. Then there's relief when he sees his kid at the other end of the playground. Then finally, a smile of satisfaction as he resumes his game of Break-a-Brick.

What I learned from Christopher Plummer

Back in 2004, my old university gave Christopher Plummer an honorary degree. I covered it for the student newspaper, guessing it would be like most of these ceremonies: coma-inducingly dull. Not this one. Plummer stole the show.

He leaped to the podium and bombastically cried out to all the newly minted graduates that, "You have finally escaped! Let's hear it for the inmates!"

Then, he took a more somber tone, and admitted he always regretted not attending university. He wished he got to experience the fellowship and camaraderie that comes with a few good years of university. Then he signed off with a rousing call to grab life by the neck and hold it close, or something far more eloquent like that.

Afterwards, there was a short press scrum with some local press. One reporter asked about his regret over not getting a degree.

Plummer corrected him. No, he said, I don't miss the degree. What I regret is missing out on the university experience. The rich friendships that come from that experience. The camaraderie.

 

Whether he was playing to the crowd or not, his regret of not getting the university experience – like most regrets when someone admits them – was also advice: We should wring as much experience from this surreal time as possible. 

That advice didn’t turn my worldview upside down. It did confirm my existing bias for mixing academics with debauchery. I worked hard on my class assignments and wrote for the student newspaper. I also partied hard, destroyed my hearing at loud concerts in small dive bars, travelled when I could, crashed on countless couches, and even tossed a dwarf. Along the way, I made life-long friends who shared in those experiences.

Now I'm older, and slightly wiser, so I know that Plummer’s advice isn't just good university advice. It’s damn good life advice. You don’t even need to go to university. Life well lived is an informal education made up of new experiences, strong friendships, and, to use Plummers’ term, camaraderie. 

Whether I was predisposed to this point-of-view or Plummer influenced me, I'm not sure. I usually opted for grabbing the richer experience than the "smart" move. Stay home or go out and meet friends. Stick around in Toronto or move to Budapest. Big or small, grabbing those crazy choices that life threw at me unlocked incredible experiences, sparked new relationships, and strengthened existing friendships – or camaraderie. 

If you read Plummer's obituaries, you see a man who’s seeking different roles and stories. Acting on Broadway, or in Hollywood. The Sound of Music then Hamlet. A historical drama here, a crime thriller there. How about Star Trek IV? Lead roles, bit roles, and everything in between. That sounds like a man building a life, grabbing one experience after another. That's a good life, and education, to emulate.

Berlin Remembers

 

Yesterday, as I was picking up my son from the Kita, I saw one of those red memorial candles on the ground beside the door. Someone had lit a candle and put some carnations in the plague that commemorated Rosa Luxemburg having lived in that building for a few years in the early 1900s.

It turns out that yesterday was the anniversary of her murder by paramilitaries in 1919.

So what does a Marxist killed 100 years ago have to do with anything? 

Nothing... And everything.

I don't think there's another city that goes out of its way to remember as much as Berlin does. The good bits and the bad, ugly bits. Rosa Luxemburg is just one of many brutal openers to the tragedies the city would experience. The Nazis. The War. The Holocaust. The Defeat. The Trials. The Wall. 

Guilt is a word that gets thrown around a lot in Germany. But, another accurate word is courage. It can't be easy for a country to reckon with its past the way Germany does. To openly remember its history, instead of revising it. 

It's both chilling and refreshing to walk along the streets of Berlin and see the golden stumbling stones that bear the names of Jewish deportees, along with their fate: liberation, escape, or death camp. 

You see these types of memorials everywhere. The small statue in the quiet square where the July 20 plotters were executed. The eerie stone monuments to the Soviet war dead. The concrete and steel foundation line that still runs along the path of the Berlin Wall.

In Berlin, and much of Germany, history is still a lesson you can learn from, instead of a myth that you believe in, an ideal you buy, or a grudge you nurse.

We live in a strange age where everyone lives on their own plains of reality, feeding on information that only confirms their biases. And the way things are going, that looks like it isn't going to change soon.

Being honest about our history is getting tougher. But it's good to see it's still happening in some places.