ArcaMax

He kept emailing me about the slide. I had already told him what I knew: There wasn't extra funding for a replacement slide. The parks department wasn't ignoring the request. They wanted to redo the entire playground, and in that context, it was a fair question. Was it worth investing in something temporary, knowing it would be replaced?

I stood in the middle of the seesaw where two valid questions were asked, and for some people it's easy to forget that there are people behind emails or behind decisions. But, that's harder in a small town.

A few weeks later, at my children's school, we held a town hall on the state of the school. The school's cook came up to me and pulled someone along with her. It was him. Our kids go to school together. He nodded toward his daughter sitting nearby and said, "I just want her to have a slide before she doesn't want to use a slide anymore."

It's one thing to weigh a request on paper. It's another to see the person it belongs to, to understand that what you're really being asked to measure is time. Not project funding or capital improvements, but a childhood that won't last forever. What's the cost of a temporary slide against that finite timeline?

The park he emails about is the same park where my son practices with his team. I usually park and have a Zoom or answer emails in the car, with the hood of my car framing the playground he emails me about, plywood covering where the slide would be. The tendrils of our existence merge.

Another tendril found me while I was touring the police department. The supervisor of the victim assistance unit recognized me, not from a council meeting, but from the sidelines of our sons' soccer games. "He's getting better," she assured me.

"If I can convince him to stop dancing on the field," I said. She laughed and replied, "Oh, I have to ask mine to put the strings of his pants inside or he'll twirl them around."

Earlier in the week, I had voted to reallocate funding away from a police project to cover deferred maintenance across the city. Not because public safety didn't matter, but because so did everything else. And sometimes they were the less visible things, like the roofs that keep fire stations operational. The drinking fountains that needed replacing in the parks where our kids play.

While we had matched, even exceeded, what the state had contributed to the police project, it still wouldn't be enough to avoid criticism. It never is. There is always a valid argument on the other side of a vote like that.

Most people will never sit on a city council, but they'll recognize this feeling immediately: the desire to do the right thing when every option leaves something or someone behind.

That's the part of local government people don't see. The decisions don't live in a vacuum. They live in conversations, in parking lots, in school cafeterias. The parent asking for a playground improvement is someone you'll stand next to at pickup. The person who needs expanded resources is someone whose kid shares a field with yours.

In a place you call home, being right doesn't create distance. It creates proximity. You don't get to make a decision and move on. You carry it with you, into the next conversation, the next game, the next email waiting in your inbox. And then, with all of that in mind, you make the next decision anyway.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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