Cracks In The Flashback

I'm back-dating this post to Monday, because that's when I meant to actually make the post active. With all the running around I've been doing, though, I neglected to do it.
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Just imagine that playground with some rusty swingsets and a lot less grass growing through the cracks, and you'll have the scene as it appeared when I was in elementary school. I seem to remember a circle being painted roughly where the picture was taken, for games of duck duck goose and the like. It was on this particular playground that I distinctly remember one of my classmates pushing me down during one of our rough games of playing spies (or something like that) and making me land on my nose. I remember eventually calming down about the nosebleed, but everybody else freaked out about the sight of so much blood, especially when mom took me back into the classroom that afternoon to collect my things. I remember the guy felt pretty bad about pushing me, too.

In third grade, we were big enough to be allowed onto the big playground down the hill, on the other side of the main elementary school building. This playground wasn't kidding around, since it had an endless supply of jungle gyms (of the sort that probably aren't allowed on playgrounds today because they were so freakin' dangerous), swings, and basketball hoops. My friends and I usually bypassed all of that, though, and made for these ramps on the annex buildings. They made excellent sewers for our games of Ninja Turtles (I was always Donatello), and when that craze faded, they were always a good home base - even after I nearly swallowed a bee while I was sitting on one of these ramps, drinking a Pepsi.