"Time Is a Child Playing" by Richard Lewis

It's summer. School is out. The streets and the parks of New York City have begun to change. Fire hydrants are opened; swimming pools are filled; drinking fountains begin to overflow--and in playgrounds throughout the warming city, sprinklers shower into the air.

For the lucky child a daily visit to one of these sprinklers is not only a way to cool off--it is to challenge the great leaps and boundings of this watery paradise. Some children, too excited to change their clothes, simply dive in, running through the spray until they are soaking wet. Others, in bathing suits, cautiously approach the surging waters and with their empty hands reach out to feel how strong or how cold this oldest of the elements might be. Like sand pipers, the children dart in and out of the sprinkler's splaying waters, constantly inventing ways to outwit its fluid movements. They squirm and hop, they jump and kick, and then suddenly, as if in prayer, they stop in the middle of a large plume of falling water and, looking up, serenely drink in every moment of its playful wetness.

Sitting on a bench nearby, I feel envious that I cannot take part in their abandon, their rightful enthusiasm in being a player with the play of water itself. If William Blake is correct and "Energy is Eternal Delight," then what I see is a field of energy, a field of playing in which these children have let go of our all-too-human constraints. They have become, each in their own way, partners in the play of liquid forces that make these waters alive. Perhaps this interplay of the human and the surrounding elements is part of the genius of childhood. To run with the wind, to play with the sand, to play with water are not merely idle statements of language, but real descriptions of what a child does when he or she encounters these properties. Through this profound gesture of our playing, we enter the life of the wind, sand, and water--or as one eight-year-old, Johnny, recently wrote, "When I am playing I feel like hugging the wind and kissing and singing with the air, pushing the air far away. I am very, very happy."