The Slide

The children, possessed by a frenzy, chase one another around, upon, up and down our giant slide structure. Their chemistry activates something 'demonic', uncontrollable. A teacher points out to me three children in the nearby sandbox, looking like toy soldiers, with colored, plastic buckets upside-down on their heads, the handles fitting like chin-straps. 'That's how normal children behave, ' she said, having seen children come and go at our school for a quarter-century. We look back to our Slide of Madness, and I try unsuccessfully to peer into the children's hearts. When one gets violent, as they tend to do, I take the child off the slide. 'Tell ____ you're sorry, ' I say. 'Now go over to the sandbox a little while. When you calm down, you can come back and try again.' The parents of these children seem like good people, some extraordinarily so. Yet some of the children seem to have a will toward frenzy, a need to create a whirlwind, and I feel the heart of darkness here (but I know there's a greater Heart beneath it) . They fight about everything, until it seems the fighting itself is the point, not what they're fighting about. Sometimes we hear at school that a family's breaking up, and in that case the outbursts are as natural as a supernova in the heavens — cosmic, inherent in the laws of the universe, and we bring whatever gentleness, whatever compassion and healing we can. But often, when I gaze into the children's hearts as they run like monkeys around the board, it's too murky to see much. And then of course, after contemplating all this, I'll turn to the morning paper...