Numbers in Lines
Childcare is infrastructural, logistical, and the labor of human resource management: to free up the parent, to work, there must be work to occupy the child. On Labor Day, when the schools close, family becomes work, work becomes family, and it all becomes all about numbers. Hands, bodies, eyes. When Children’s Fairyland opened in 1950, it was an industrial time, so there were “costumed guides leading children through a fairytale landscape”; in our era, the place is designed around a more open-plan concept, the idea that once you’re in, you can trust that your kids—wherever else in the chaos they can go—probably can’t get out.
On Monday, almost everyone we chatted with in line at the Fairyland 75th anniversary parade celebration—after we BARTed to 19th Street and joined the parade that slowly walked down 21st to the lake, and then snaked along Grand to the park entrance, where it all seamlessly became the line to get into the park—was connected to the enterprise by a mix of work and family. There was a puppeteer who now puppeted elsewhere but had puppeted here as a child, for example, and some parents of a child who was now no longer a child and worked at the place. There was a family of Ferry employees with some other connection to the thing—whose Oakland Alameda Water Taxi hat we coveted—who told us about a homonymous fairyland-themed ferry event they had just come from. A family member of one of our preschool teachers now works for the park. And of course there were all the various Fairyland employees who were handing out noisemakers and bubblemachines, all the while dancing, blocking traffic, and generally working at shepherding all the bodies safely and happily across land to the place where you can enter the park. So many bodies to see with your eyes (and, also, “remember, we hold hands crossing the street!” as I said many times).
But if a parade is an efficient way to move people across land, a joyous progression through space, a queue is a synonym for idle frustration, somehow the worst way to do nothing that there is, to precisely the extent that you stop moving forward in space and only progress in time. When that happened at the entrance, we melted down and made for the shade and grass instead; R several times secreted herself at the base of various trees while N sat on my lap rather than subject his bottom to the nonexistent pasto, while C collected sticks in the shapes of letters. Rainbow ribbons for twirling helped, as did promises of getting good crackers inside (the pretzels from home were rejected as totally subpar). When the line only grew behind us—as time moved forward while we stayed in the shade—we decided that being in the parade was basically like being in a long line for a long time, and so it counted, and so we rather seamlessly joined the line close to the entrance and proceeded through; it was all far too chaotic for anyone to even notice, much less care about our small but definite civic crime.
Inside, everything happened. There were multiple reunions with old preschool buddies now at kindergartens and shushings from other parents at the performance of Teddy Bear’s Picnic. We saw children juggle and balance on a ball and we raced with gleeful abandon through tunnels and pathways and almost unbelievably crowded space, in constant text contact with another friend whom we never managed to meet up with, despite at one point both being able to hear the same song on the loudspeaker (Toto’s “Africa”). We were by the donkeys when E was on the merry-go-round; we were on the merry-go-round when E was watching a puppet show, only later reconstructable by reviewing our texts. R struck poses under the banner of rainbow balloons while E was on a mission to deliver a GO BART! card to Barty, who was there at the lawn, but required considerable weaving around into finding again. C was obsessed with the Snow White statue (despite having never seen the movie), and there was less carnage than expected when N realized we had brought the elephant keys from the zoo, rather than the Fairyland keys you use to start the music boxes. Afterward, when asked what happened at Fairyland, another important event was the snow cone you could freely season with syrup.
When enough time had progressed, some of us biked home to lie under a tree and listen to the wind, some departed to have lunch with friends, planning to return (and not returning), while others, after toying with the idea of taking a bus back home, eventually decided on account of the Sunday schedule simply to retrace the parade route back the 19th Street station. Some of us were carried in a parent’s arms, their pants slowly becoming soiled with just a little closely held urine (only discovered later, and retroactively explaining the mood); others, gently, walked through Oakland, eyes aloft, remarking on the trees, the trucks, the sky.
