Wrestling with some questions Tuesday morning, I took leave from the house for a couple of hours. That’s nothing new; I’ve often hit the backroads to air out thoughts, maybe gain a different perspective.
Such is more challenging now, during a pandemic, because rest rooms can be more difficult to come by. Instead of guiding our little car toward the open roads, I made the 25-minute drive to Veteran’s Park in College Station.
There, I sat in the car, rolled the windows up and down in response to brief rain showers, talked out loud to myself and scribbled entries on my notepad. When necessary, there’s even a rest room.
Do we take parks for granted?
No, that’s too easy an assumption. Let’s not try to overdramatize the point. Instead, consider the joyful memories we have of different parks.
Treasures
My earliest might be a rural park maintained by the Gregg County Precinct 3 commissioner, I believe near Liberty City, Texas. Then there was the city park where we played Little League baseball. When our family traveled, we would stop at a roadside picnic table to eat a sack lunch. I remember a particular Easter Sunday sunrise service at Teague Park in Longview.
A couple of co-workers and I started shooting basketball after work on Tuesdays at Jackson Street Park in Brenham, Texas. Soon, we had enough guys joining us that we got pretty good games going. When my daughter was 2 years old, we had great bonding time at Le Tulle Park outside Bay City, Texas, feeding ducks and swinging.
Leah and I have also been regular visitors to state parks in Texas. She counted a while back that we’ve been to more than 40 of them. We’ve also enjoyed several state parks in New York, and have hiked most of the trails of the amazing Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
While not as thoroughly, we’ve also been to several national parks, including living and working an entire summer in Yellowstone, the world’s first national park.
Parks are not limited to the United States, though. As that thought crossed my mind, I could easily recall visiting parks in Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Germany, Poland, Tobago, Thailand, Mexico and probably most of the others.
What are your favorite park memories?
Parks are one of the great investments of a society. Treasure them, use them, take care of them.
By the way, I came home with plenty of notes and clear answers to my questions.
Steve Martaindale 