A mob of very young school children, thirty or forty at least, herded by a train of attending adults, come into the park while I’m eating lunch. Their semi-tidy line, a convoy of big heads all about the same height on top of small, compact little bodies, collapses into small pods of children as the adults lay out blankets for a picnic on the grass under the trees.
Periodically, one of the children will stand and revolve over to another pod, where he or she will talk to an adult, or to another child in tiny, piping voices that I can’t really hear except as a high countermelody above the burble of noise in the park, and then yet another child will stand and move to yet another pod, like some diagram of an obscure chemical process, ions and protons exchanging their orbits in a lovely, burbling dance.
I watch the groups shift and the adults try to keep track as the children wander here and there, beneath the trees, on the grass, under a blue sky, the bright sun shining down, and a pleasurable pressure builds up just behind my eyes; I take it all in, and sigh.
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