Around you, everywhere

Today, as Cleo and I marched up Federal Hill for our second Serious Playground Session of the day, it occurred to me that the scattered constellation of play spaces strewn across Baltimore is rather remarkable. Wedged into vacant lots, pressed into city blocks, or designed from the very start as sandy exceptions in a realm of concrete, the playgrounds are a great, unusual gift to the tiniest citizens of the city, and their caretakers.

Can any theory of capitalism really fully explain their ubiquity? Urban designers, public health advocates, and developmental psychologists may all have played a role - but it still seems simply improbable that plastic slides and bucket swings would ever triumph against, say, a skyscraper, or a block of row homes. And yet they do: gentle concessions to play dot the city like the network of Abbasid wells that punctuated the path from Baghdad to Mecca.

Middle Eastern desert oases offer one parallel, then, but so too does the public musical landscape of contemporary America. What I mean is this: as one moves through Baltimore - or, really, any American city or village - one's bound to hear, as one moves, snippets of music, here and there. Today a band performed a sound check in the Pier Six pavilion. A speaker in the infant room at the Maryland Science Center oozed calming electronica. Angry rap declared itself, from a nearby car window, at the intersection of Northern and Falls. And the P.A. system at Whole Foods was tuned to a pop soundtrack.

But that's not all, of course. One may stumble onto local pools of music - but simply by turning on the radio, one can immerse oneself in an entire sea. Yesterday, as I drove Cleo home from a walk and, yes, another spell at a playground, I happened to hear a part of Beethoven's Piano Sonata no. 30. A wonderful piece: but even more wonderful, perhaps, that it should be playing, for any ears near a radio, on a Monday in 2010. It was, in a sense, everywhere.

"Oh, all is music! All has been turned to music!" wrote John Hall Wheelock in his poem 'Night Thoughts in Age.' Such a line reminds me, in turn, that, from Cleo's perspective, playgrounds never mark the limits of play. Sure, it's terrific that there are swings in every neighborhood. But, just as the blanket of radio-borne music knows no boundaries, the world of play for a one-year-old is unbounded. One can rock on a rocking chair, or play with a bottle top, with a delight equal to that offered by a slide. All is music. And all, for some, is a playground.