Sunday at the Park

On Sunday we put Jack into his wagon and dragged him over the bumpy New Orleans roads to a nearby park.  He spent the first half of playtime there being afraid of a motorized kid-sized John Deere tractor, and then when the other kids abandoned the tractor and he no longer felt compelled to subject himself to its terrors, he wandered over to the asphalt and picked up approximately forty pieces of sidewalk chalk and clutched them to his chest.  One doesn’t draw with sidewalk chalk, of course – one hoards it, and then one walks around dropping pieces and picking them up and dropping another piece while one is bent over picking the first one up and then dropping three more, generally looking like one belongs in a Marx Bros or Charlie Chaplin movie.

After a few moments of this, a girl, maybe 11 years old, struggled through the park gate with a heavily loaded reusable grocery bag slung over her arm.  Near the site of our son’s farcical chalk-dropping escapades, she met two other slightly younger girls who had just arrived from the opposite gate.  I could tell Girl #1 had something special in that huge bag that she couldn’t wait to share.  I craned my neck a bit, and then my jaw dropped in delight, because what this girl was carrying turned out to be a live duck.

The girl looked around at her wider audience, grinned, and pulled out her duck, pleased as punch.  She was pleased, that is – the duck was nervous, and he eyed Virgil warily.  He looked like an adolescent duck – a bit weedy and stringy of neck, but definitely nearly full grown.  (Of course, what know I of duck development stages?)  The girl announced that ducks live to the age of 18, so “he’ll be going to college with me!”  I thought to myself, ‘not if my dog has anything to say about it,’ and held tightly to The Scourge’s leash as he strained to get closer.

Speaking of getting closer: as soon as Jack saw the duck, he lost his mind.  He flung the sidewalk chalk to the ground and raced toward the poor thing, screeching with mighty joy.  Broken motorized kid tractors give my son hives, but a nervous pecking duck merits no caution.  Something to note for the future.  Jack is over 35 pounds these days, and I’m sure he cut an intimidating figure, barreling toward the scrawny waterfowl.  I was busy wrangling the dog, so Patrick leapt forward and tried to direct Jack’s enthusiasm into appropriate avenues of duck-toddler relations, with limited success.

Anyway, I snapped a few pictures from a distance, using the terrible camera in my phone, and then we had to leave because Jack just wouldn’t leave the duck alone.  We’d been there long enough anyway.  He sat in his wagon wailed as if the world was ending, while we cruelly wheeled him away.  Once we were home, some crackers and juice set everything to rights, and he was once again our happy boy.  It takes a lot of energy to parent an animal-loving toddler, but it sure leads to some cute interactions. Especially when one lives in a city where live ducks are kept as pets.