The promptmasters at Five Minute Friday have been very, very inventive with their prompts lately. At least for this contributor to the weekly writefest, I’ve had to dig deep into the gray matter. Since I don’t pre-peek into what my fellow writers come up with until I visit Kate’s place (http://katemotaung.com/2016/10/20/five-minute-friday-park/) to post, I can’t wait to see what take these mostly ladies have come up with. I hope you get a chance to visit as well … and maybe contribute!

The prompt this week is PARK. The timer is set for five minutes, so I guess it’s time to GO …

It’s been a long time since I thought about parks. In fact, I rarely think about parks. So I decided to dig into my mental files to reflect on parks through the years.

When I was a kid, my usual “park” was a vacant field on East 19th Street. It was there the neighborhood guys would congregate for a pick up game of baseball or football, occasionally being pestered by the girls of the neighborhood. There were also real parks with regular park things like swings and monkey bars and such, and there were neighborhood parks, well defined, some with stone walls like the one in People’s Park. And there were bigger parks like Eastside, Westside and Pennington. Eastside at the time featured rolling hills, great for sledding. Westside and Pennington were on opposite sides of the Passaic River … STOP

… connected by a footbridge. Westside featured the forerunner of the nation’s first submarine, the Holland submarine built in Paterson and tested in the Passaic River, as well as a deer pen where kids could visit and feed the deer. Pennington boasted the first fenced in little league baseball diamond, while Eastside had two home plate to home plate fields, one fenced and the other not. While Westside was fenced in, it was angled and high, I loved playing Little League games in the fenced fields where a well-hit ball would fly over the fence as opposed to me actually having to run around the bases {some things never change}.

Well, that’s what seeped out of the memory box this week. Now it’s time to post and see what the girls have written.

THOUGHT TO REMEMBER: A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.