A pond not unlike one I knew years ago.
Colors at "Park Merfeld"
Originally uploaded by Wattwurm’s View.
When I was a kid I use to go to Loose park in the winter with my mother and my sister to go ice skating on the frozen pond. It didn’t freeze over every year, and sometimes when it did the ice wasn’t solid enough to skate on. Those years when everything worked out perfectly were pretty cool, though.
One thing you could expect when the pond at Loose park did freeze over properly is a camera crew from the local TV news showing up to do a story. (This is what passes for *news* in Kansas City.) They would always want to interview the one kid who actually knew how to ice skate (there was always one) and the two kids pretending to play hockey. They mostly left the families alone, though.
I decided one year that I was going to be on the TV news from Loose park. I didn’t have it in me to learn how to properly ice skate — that’d be a whole lot of effort. I didn’t know anybody with hockey sticks, so that wasn’t much of an option either. The plan that I settled on was wandering back and forth on foot in the background of every shot they took, hoping that I’d make it in to something that they would show on the air.
At the end of the day, my strategy worked. I was on the far left side of the frame for a fraction of a second at the very end of the segment. The news coverage of yours truly was a bit underwhelming, I’ll admit, but it was nice to have set a goal and accomplished it.