Skatepark: CLOSED

Standing outside the gates of the skatepark, my friends, kids, and I looked wistfully in at the perfectly clean, perfectly beautiful skatepark here in town. A padlock closed the facility to us and the others who gathered on the outside looking in.
We found other things to do. We skated on a basketball court until two bicycling boys arrived wanting to use the hoop and area.
I breastfed Kellen under a tree. I chatted with my dear friend.
And we made due.
But being locked out like that made me think about America.
Being out there, looking in, felt like a metaphor.
* * *
I grew up in the 70s and 80s with jump rope, Cyndi Lauper and Jon Cusack. I grew up skiing and being and speaking my mind. I grew up in a small town in NH that lacked creativity, resourcefulness, and imagination, but it was free. No one listened to our phone conversations. No one suggested that we should be implanted with computer chips to categorize and divide us. I grew up in the woods, talking to birds, reading, and drawing, and writing.
I grew up with Zoom and the Monkees re-runs and the Twilight Zone.
When I think of my childhood I think of the CD, Free to be You and Me, and I think about hippyish rainbow designs, the 70s, and the freedom that I felt around me. Because we were moving in the right direction then. Women were becoming more free. The Civil Rights act had been signed before I was born.
* * *
I love America and being American. So much so that when I went to England for 10 days, I cried when I got back to Boston.
I cried because I was leaving my love (now my hubby) in England.
But I also really loved Boston. I still do. It is a second-kind-of-home where my grandmother still lives. I love its grittiness. Hell I even don't mind being told to Fuck Off there. The place has color and grit and guts. Being called a name is nearly a form of flattery.
* * *
But what does all this have to do with a locked skatepark? Everything. America is this amazing place filled with creativity, vitality, with abundance and soda pop fizz (remember moxie?). I grew up in a family for whom America had been a savior. My children-of-immigrant grandparents were close enough to the old country to still feel its pain.
I think Nancy Griffith says it right when she writes in her song "It's a Hard Life"

I was a child in the sixties
When dreams could be held through T.V.
With Disney and Cronkite and Martin Luther
And I believed, I believed, I believed.
Now I am the backseat driver from America
And I am not at the wheel of control.
And I am guilty, I am war, and I am the root of all evil,
Lord, and I can't drive on the left side of the road.

Now I wonder where we are headed and who is at the wheel?
Who is driving anyway?
That's why I like skateboarding. My body is driving the bus so to speak.
I am fully free and one with the world, with the trees and houses and back yards of my small American city.
* * *
Skating on the open roads after being locked out of the skatepark, I was both grateful and thoughtful...
Grateful not to be locked out and to be moving, wind in my hair, focus on my board.
Grateful for my new skateboard and the freedom to learn to ride it as a GIRL.
Grateful for my freedom of speech and right to be a writer and professor.
Grateful for the freedom to be myself and for wonderful friends.
Grateful for civil rights and liberties, grateful for the freedom I grew up in, grateful for democracy.
But also concerned.
We all have to stand up for our beliefs. It starts with us. We have to vote in these upcoming elections and send a clear message that we won't let America go that easily.
Because I, for one, don't want to be isolated. I don't want the rest of the world to have a padlock against us. I don't want to have people express their anger when I travel abroad.
We have to shout that we will not be locked out of a perfectly good country, one that is gleaming and lovely, one that deserves all of our love, work, and faith.
Because skateparks should be places where people come together to interact, to create, to express themselves freely, to be.
Because padlocks should be reserved for private areas, not public ones.
Because our children deserve to live the dream, to be free, and to believe, to believe, to believe.