About Four Dollars

It’s about four dollars—depending on the exchange rate today. If you know where to go in Paris and there’s a sale, you can buy a bottle of Bordeaux good enough to serve company for that much—or you can spend twice as much on a single indifferent glass of rouge in a singularly indifferent café. A long list of things for the same price would certainly reveal some good buys and some lousy ones. There’s nothing absolute 2,60€, about four dollars or the equivalent in rubles or pesos, yuan or piastres. It may be the tipping point for a gallon of gas in the States, but that’s another piece of psychology altogether. Otherwise, about four dollars tips nothing.

It shouldn’t anyway, but it’s been bothering me for a week. I am wondering why it costs 2,60€, about four dollars, for a child to go into the playground in a public park near where I live in Paris and another two for a parent to go along for the rides and the slides. The pétanque courts (the French version of bocce and about as understandable and interesting) are nicely maintained and free. The park administrators have even installed two coat racks, so the players don’t have to go home looking rumpled—though they have had to bring in their own coat hangers, a small one-off cost. The public toilets are free, and so are the chairs—a change for the better over the years.

The carousel next to the parc de jeu costs 1,40€, about half of about four dollars, but that seems sensible enough. There is an attendant who makes sure the children are safely mounted on the horses, issues each of them a little stick, and manages the dispenser of keys on a metal ring for them to try to catch on their lances—which considering the limited motor skills of children is worth the money since it could be worth his eye. To rent a toy sailboat to launch in the pond a hundred metres away from the playground costs 3,10€. Fair enough, it seems to me, since sailing even toy boats is an aristocratic pastime and like all fun and games of that nature should come at a price to increase the pleasure, not to mention the distinction. Ditto the pony rides. Like learning to joust (if only on a carousel), apprenticing to race 12-metre boats (if only in fifty centimetres of water) or beginning the mastery of haute école dressage (if only with a groom holding the bridle) should not be subsidized by the public purse.

Running around a playground—climbing, swinging, sliding, and generally whooping it up to the point of delirium—is not the same. As playgrounds go, this one is a peach—that is undeniable. Its ground is covered with rubber matting, which is one of the surefire giveaway signs of living in an advanced society with too few real worries: if the law of gravity could be suspended, parents and park bureaucrats would surely do it lest little heads get bumped. It is fenced in, so wandering, playing tag, and ball-chasing will not end in loss or calamity. The swings and climbing bars are all in bright colors and clean as a whistle—and color-coded for minimum age, green meaning seven years, the maximum, the highest hurdle. At one end there is a green gizmo with bosun chairs suspended from an overhead trolley that carries the children around a serpentine path back to the platform where they first jumped off squealing. Given that it works on gravity and given also an endless supply of children, it could be, finally, a patentable perpetual-motion machine, though children under seven are not allowed on the green machine, reducing potential supplies.

A wonderful playground, and no doubt expensive to build and keep bright and shiny and safe—but still a playground. What about the children whose parents don’t have about four dollars: where do they play? The carousel, the boats, and the ponies are lagniappe, icing on the cake, the baker’s thirteenth donut. Children may like them, ask for them, throw tantrums when they don’t get them, but a place to play—with or without the rubber mats and the scrupulously maintained color-coded paint jobs—seems to me a right of youth, and one of its natural rites.

This is naturally none of my business since I don’t pay taxes in France. But the parents of the children who are playing in this peach of a parc de jeu do and so do those other parents who don’t have about four dollars to buy their kids’ way in. It is their taxes that make day care, primary, secondary, and higher education free for all the children of France, that pay for cheap and good medical care, long vacations, generous pensions offered at a young age, virtual tenure in employment, and enough benefits to give Socialism a good name—and M. le Président Sarkozy daily indigestion. The same taxes can’t pay for a playground?

Of course, there are complaints about free education—especially at the universities: an annual rating of the fifty best ones in the world ignores France. Of course, tenured employment is dragging down the French economy and causing unemployment to rise among the young. Of course, the national medical plan means rationed medicine and denies some therapies and procedures altogether. Of course paying people who are not very old not to work is expensive and puts a lot of good brains on the bench, quite literally, in parks (like this one) all over France.

Of course. Maybe it’s not about four dollars to the French—and I have missed the point or seen an absence of égalité and fraternité when there is none visible to anyone else. It costs to park a car on the public streets in Paris, and the streets are well paved and clean. So playing in the parc de jeu is good because it comes at a price paid on the spot, which has maintained the park better than taxes have maintained la Sorbonne.

Maybe this is merely cynicism or my inner capitalist parading itself as my comforter. Maybe

trying to sort out why education is free and why the playground is payant is a pointless search for a common denominator, an attempt to put a price on value. Maybe it’s not a question of equity, but of economics improvised on the fly. Or maybe it is about four dollars, nothing more.

© Joseph Lestrange