Neighborhood doings, at the park clean-up.

A few weeks ago I headed over to the quarry park to put in a few hours at the annual park council-sponsored spring clean-up.

I met 2 heads of the local park councils, and a lot of other people to boot.

As soon as the park council head gave me a bag and went to go out from the fieldhouse to the park with me, we get out of the doors, and a few people are standing around looking at a long-billed brown bird on the ground by the window.

As it turns out, it hit the window, then they poke it and it starts up but can't fly, then they take a cell photo and send it to a suburban wildlife refuge who ID it as a migratory woodcock and send over a volunteer, then a couple people get a box and manage to maneuver it into it, etc.

All the while, I'm standing around thinking of these (white) people from the neighborhood who grew up around there and really don't know anything about the outdoors, and they're standing around outside a park building looking at a woodcock.

They also talked a lot about gang activity in the neighborhood - for example, one middle-aged (white) woman called the local Wings 'n' Rings "Wings 'n' Kings".

Another, an older (white) woman, said that some people give kids $5 on the park playground to go deliver a bag of drugs to a person on the other side of the lot.

"And as a kid that's a lot of money," she was like.  "Though as a kid, I would have bid them up to ten."

She also said that it's a shame how some of these kids don't want to go home, and one kid she tutors down at the local youth club, her mom's a prostitute and a druggie and she didn't want to go home and was asking if she could move out now that she's eighteen, though she had asked her mom and she had said she couldn't and she'd sue her.