Parents Find Quality Time--in Line

It must’ve looked to the teenagers passing by like the grown-up version of U2 was coming to town.

The line of folks clutching checkbooks stretched from the Mason Park gymnasium across the lawn to the parking lot and down along the sidewalk around the gym. Every curbside parking spot on every street around the Chatsworth park was filled.

But it wasn’t concert tickets we were trying to score. Just a spot for our kids in the park’s popular summer basketball league--an opportunity to add another set of practices and games to summer schedules already bursting at the seams.

The ritual has grown wearily familiar to many Valley parents. It is repeated across the Valley several times each year, as we scramble to keep our children busy through sports leagues run by local parks.

There’s T-ball, softball and baseball in the spring. Then summer basketball, then fall basketball. There is soccer in August and football in September. And there are all-star teams and club teams, with practices and playoffs in between.

There is something to play--something to sign up for--all year-round. And that means at any time, at any park, there may be parents standing in a line.

*

The sign-up sheets announced that registration would begin Tuesday at 6 p.m. But Mason Park veterans know that parents who dally risk consigning their children to the dreaded waiting list. So the line began forming hours before.

I’d left work work early, rushed home, grabbed my two youngest kids from in front of the TV and hauled them off with me to the park. They could skate or play on the swings, I thought, for the 30 minutes or so it would take me to enroll their sister in the league.

But when I pulled up to the park a few minutes before 6, I realized I was already late. There were more than 100 parents waiting, in a line that stretched across the park almost to the sidewalk.

I tossed my car keys to my 8-year-old. “Here. Help your sister put her skates on, then lock the door,” I said, dodging cars as I dashed across the parking lot to take my place in line.

I raced to overtake a determined-looking woman striding across the grass in a red dress and heels. Elbowing her out of the way, I slipped in line ahead of her and behind a grim-faced man wearing a business suit and tie.

An anomaly in the mostly female crowd, he kept glancing at his watch and scanning the crowd for any sign that the line might move. Clearly a novice, he’d agreed to stop by and sign up the kids on his way home from work, so his wife could get dinner cooked on time.

Now he realized his family would be eating without him tonight. It would take more than two hours for him to reach the front of the line. Those unlucky enough to arrive after us faced a three-hour wait.

I watched my children roll along the walkway near the gym, the older one helping the baby balance on her skates. I let them buy Popsicles from the ice cream man--never mind that they hadn’t had dinner yet. We clearly had a long evening ahead.

It wasn’t long before signs of impatience began rippling through the line.

“Like I’ve got nothing better to do than spend an entire evening waiting on line,” declared a woman behind me, her voice rising, shrill with indignation. There was dinner to make, a science project that needed work, a load of laundry still in the washer at home. And her children, like mine, were running wild in the park.

Some fished in their purses for cellular phones, then frantically tried to reschedule piano lessons or cancel dinner dates. Others dashed off, retrieving kids from batting cages and volleyball games, and we held their places until they returned.

But as the evening wore on, the complaints died down, replaced by the sound of laughter and the buzz of conversation. The line was dissolving into small knots of people--mini coffee klatches--as we discovered common friendships, passions and problems.

There was talk of field trips and bake sales, of summer camps and sports clinics, of toilet training and teenage angst.

My friend recognized a former classmate she hadn’t seen since they left Kennedy High decades ago. Two strangers standing next to each other in line discovered their sons are classmates, and one hasn’t been bringing home notes from the teacher. And the grim-faced man in front of me met a neighbor from up the street, who agreed to share the secret of her perfect front lawn.

And gradually, this shutdown in our busy lives began to seem less than tragic. There are worse things, after all, than being forced to spend a breezy spring evening watching the sun set in a lovely park, surrounded by trees and children and neighbors and friends.

*

Before the night was over, more than 300 parents would file into the Mason Park gym, fork over $70 per child and sign their sons and daughters up for basketball.

It was an agonizingly slow and frustrating process. But it was also a ritual of the sort that gives a place like Chatsworth its identity; a bonding that revived a sense of community among people generally too busy to care.

I thought of that as I watched my children running barefoot up a hill at the center of the park, then racing to a tree on the other side. The two hours I spent in line, they spent collecting rocks and branches, pretending to be dinosaurs, climbing trees and jumping from them onto the soft grass below.

They sat and watched a man play the piccolo, and I watched them ask him questions. And I did not run after them to warn of the danger of talking to strangers.

This is my neighborhood, and it felt good that evening to think of it as a place where my children feel safe, free to indulge their fantasies and explore their world. And a place where their parents look beyond color and culture to see the dreams and goals we all share.

I had gone to the park in search of another activity to structure my children’s time, and staked out my spot in line among parents in search of the same.

But it was easy while we chatted aimlessly in the fading sun to recognize the joy for our children of free play, and the value for parents of free time--even free time forced on us by a dreadfully long line.