I wouldn’t let him use a giant stick to pole vault over the hockey boards…

Av and I took a walk this evening, while D picked up El from his track meet. We ended up at our favorite neighborhood playground, where a lone boy about Av’s age was running about. We made a pretty straight line for the monkey bars — Avery’s natural habitat. (He was, after all, known as Monkey on my blog for years and years!) Playground Kid sidles up to us, kind of sizes us up a little, then decides we’re worth talking to.

“You might think I’m poor,” he says, by way of hello. “But I’m not. I’m definitely not.”

Avery notices nothing out of the ordinary, just whizzes past and throws over his shoulder a quick, “Hi! Can you skip a bar like this?” while swinging his lithe self across the playground equipment, over to the chin up bar, shimmying up a pole to touch the top, then swinging back over to the starting platform. “Whoa. That was a lot easier than last time I was here.”

Playground Kid hesitates, puts one hand on the first rung. “I’m not very good at this,” he says, and hangs for a moment before dropping to the sand. “Have you ever survived nearly getting killed?”

“Yeah! All the time,” shouts Av, and he takes a running start and leaps at the trunk of a nearby tree, scrambling up about six or seven feet before gravity takes over. “Whoa! You try!”

The two boys, strangers only moments ago, are soon laughing like mad, throwing themselves at the trees, howling and trading dangerous tales of death-defying deeds. And I am marveling, wondering if I have ever jumped into friendship with such easy abandon.

My boy, sticks and mud and hollering, takes off running.