60 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
him harder. “Hum-um-um-um,” he
said, stumbling forward four steps.
Then some others nearby started
shoving Giles, and Giles started run-
ning. We chased him around for the
remainder of recess. Five of us at first,
then ten, then twenty, some of us his
friends. He wasn’t very fast.
The unspoken idea was to be the one
to throw the shove that produced the
hum with the longest string of sylla-
bles. The longest string of syllables that
first day was six. I was the one who
made it happen. I made it happen twice,
then shoved even harder in pursuit of
seven hums, but Giles fell to his knees
after humming just once.
The second day, no one got higher
than five, and I started thinking six
itself was the goal. I started thinking
that to get above six would be a mat-
ter of fortune rather than finesse. Seven
or eight would be a grand slam, but
six was the homer. Six was all that you
could reasonably aim for.
Had you asked me if I thought Giles
Crowley had feelings, I would proba-
bly have told you that I had feelings,
because that would have addressed what
I would have thought you were secretly
trying to get at with your question, and
I’d have wanted you to know that I was
smarter than you.
On what would otherwise have been
the third day of the game, a thunder-
storm struck and we had indoor recess.
Someone said something about beat-
ing six, and I said something about for-
tune and finesse, my grand-slam-ver-
sus-homer idea, and then someone else
said I had it all wrong, that batting or-
ders were designed to increase the like-
lihood that a grand slam might hap-
pen, that that’s why you put the sluggers
fourth in the lineup, behind the three
guys with the highest batting aver-
ages—to increase the chances of load-
ing the bases prior to a homer. In other
words, sure, seven hums might be less
of a homer than it was a grand slam,
but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth
strategizing about: there were things
you could do. I conceded the point to
the kid who was making it—beyond
the basic rules, I knew little about base-
ball—and this opened up the conver-
sation to all manner of hypotheses on
how to increase the likelihood of seven-
humming Giles. There were those of
us who thought it was a matter of
the kind of ground on which he stood,
a simple question of grass versus as-
phalt. Others thought it was more about
the points of contact—two palms to
one shoulder to send him spinning, a
palm to each shoulder to keep him
moving straight, maybe even just one
palm low on the spine so he’d buckle
as he stumbled. Still others believed it
was more Giles-dependent—how rigid
he was at the moment of impact, the
angles at which his feet were pointed,
whether he’d eaten his Flintstones that
morning.The fourth day, recess was back out-
side, but shoving Giles was no lon-
ger fun. This may have been because
we’d acknowledged aloud and then
proceeded to analyze what had for-
merly been, or at least had seemed to
have been, a telepathic understand-
ing of the game’s strange goal, and
thus robbed the game of all, or most,
of its magic.
Then again, it may have been be-
cause of how Giles, as we rushed
through the exit to find him in the
field, was standing just a few feet out-
side the door, as if he was giving us a
chance to catch up.
He smiled at me when my eyes
met his.
Someone gave him a shove. He
hummed twice and ran. We chased
him for a couple of minutes, then
stopped.SPLASH PA D, 2015
O
n our way back home to Chi-
cago from Paris, my wife and I
stayed for a couple of days with some
friends of ours who lived in Brooklyn.
They had two children, a five- and a
three-year-old. Pleasant little kids.
Adorable, too. Maybe we loved them.
For sure we loved their parents. Their
parents were our favorite couple—
still are.
On the second afternoon of the visit,we all went to Prospect Park, to an at-
traction there that they called the splash
pad: a sort of giant fountain with mul-
tiple spigots distributed along its cir-
cumference. Scores of little kids get in-
side this thing, the floor of which I
believe is soft—I didn’t go in, but splash
pad, right?—and play, with high energy,
amid flying water.
Our friends’ kids seemed so thrilled
to be there. All the kids in the splash
pad seemed thrilled. They played alone
and they played with their families and
they played with their friends and with
strangers, too. They pretended to be
this or that kind of animal, this or that
robot, this or that hero or villain or ve-
hicle. They taught dances and jokes
and songs to one another, leaped around
in patterns and proto-flirted.
Their pleasure was contagious. I
was feeling kid positive. So kid pos-
itive that, when I told our friends how
kid positive I felt, I got a little expan-
sive, almost lyrical. I said that these
kids in the splash pad were better than
we had been, that the way these kids
were playing in the splash pad was
better than the ways in which we
would have played in the splash pad
if we’d had a splash pad when we were
kids, and it would leave them, I sus-
pected, with the kinds of lasting sen-
sory impressions that form the kinds
of joyful memories that loving par-
ents hope their children will carry al-
ways, thereby fostering deep within
them greater capacities for kindness
and decency than the people of our
generation possessed, and that, down
the line, these greater capacities for
kindness and decency would grant
these kids the strength they’d need to
neutralize and overcome what would
otherwise be our generation’s mal-
forming influence and, eventually,
turn the whole country, perhaps even
the whole world, into a safer and
friendlier place. Or so it seemed to
me, I said.
“Are you making fun of us, Levin?”
our friends said.
“You making fun of our children?”
they said.
“I don’t think so,” I said, and that
was true at the time. THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
Adam Levin reads “Kid Positive.”