The evening of the day

"I sit and watch," sang Mick Jagger in 1965, "the children play."

Well, I've been doing my share of that recently, as I've been arriving at the big playground down the street from Cleo's nursery at about 4:30, so that she can stay on and play as the other kids trundle back up the hill to the end of their school day. Cleo's never the only one who stays on; there's usually a cohort of between five to ten kids whose parents gather on the picnic tables and chat, or send a few e-mails, or read. Or simply watch as the children play, wonderfully, all around us: disappearing into bushes, tossing balls, hanging from beams, and grappling, while they call out superheroes' names.

It's a lovely sight - but, given that here are only six days left in Cleo's school year, it's also one shot through with a slight current of bittersweetness. Will there be a comparable playground, one wonders, in the fall, at her new kindergarten? Will she see, with any regularity, these children once they're all enrolled in their various new schools? And what becomes of the surprisingly strong ties between us parents that have developed over the past three years?

I know, I know: it's still very early summer. The Orioles are still in first; the temperature has only hit 90 once thus far. And yet, struck by the simultaneous beauty and transitoriness of the scenes on the playground, I sometimes feel like a character in one of the late summers that seem to dominate the fiction of Updike, and Cheever. Think, for instance, of Cheever's Shady Hill, which seems strangely poised between summer and a suddenly aggressive autumn. "It was a frosty night," we read in "The Country Husband," "when he got home. The air smelled sharply of change."

That's how the air in the playground, I would argue, smells. In the process, though, it arguably only heightens the simple wonder of the scene. Nabokov once wrote appreciatively of Cheever's story, admiring its structure: "the impression of there being too many things happening in it," he claimed, "is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interfacings." But I might put it even more simply: the summer acquires a tragic beauty simply through the fact that it cannot last. The sun will give way to ice; the children will grow tall; the slides will no longer interest in the same way. But somehow, for now, it is all just right.

"It is," the Stones concluded, "the evening of the day. I sit and watch the children play."