Your daily downer.

This was originally going to be a post called “What the Hell is wrong with people?” but I find a lot of the fire has gone out me. No pun intended.

Last Monday, we pulled up to my daughter’s school to drop her off and noticed that the playground was roped off with yellow tape. Apparently over the weekend, it burned. And that’s really all I know for sure, “it burned.” The blue plastic slide is melted. The yellow vinyl covering the metal skeleton has scorched and peeled away in the places closest to the heat. If Salvador Dali designed kids’ equipment, this is what it would look like.

My daughter’s teacher says, “We don’t know if it was accidental or on purpose. Apparently, there is not enough evidence to know.” But how can this NOT be deliberate? I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario in which a vinyl, plastic, and metal playground spontaneously combusts. Lightning strike? Fire sprites? Personally, I suspect someone was fooling around up there with matches or a lighter and things burned a lot faster than they thought. At least, I hope it was stupidity and not deliberate destruction.

The teacher says, “This was a playground that was donated to us from an outside sponsor.” Our school proudly displays the oversized novelty check for 10 grand that we got from a corporation in or around 2003. Since our school is not exactly swimming in cash, there’s no way they could have afforded it otherwise. The teacher continues, “I assume that the damage is covered under our insurance, but I don’t really know any details about the possibility of it being replaced.”

I try to come up with the bright side to everything, but I’m having a hard time finding the plus to someone destroying a playground at a children’s school. The culprits hopefully learned that things burn fast? They understand what guilt and remorse feel like? I can’t even be sure of that.

It’s been more than a week since this happened, and now there’s orange mesh around the playground. That’s all the progress I’ve seen. The kids still have four swings and some other playground equipment, albeit older and ALSO with a messed up slide from earlier vandalism.

I’ve asked Emily if she knows what happened. She doesn’t. That’s going to be a tough one to explain.