My Dream: Playground in the heart

Thea Ryan, 9, loves the monkey bars in the playground at Gulfport Elementary school. So on the last day of classes in the old building, she writes her name on them, claiming them as a memory that never can be razed.

Photo and interview by JAMIE FRANCIS
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 13, 2002

March 22 was the last day of class at Gulfport Elementary School. It will soon be demolished to make way for a new school building. Thea Ryan, 9, a fourth-grader, is confident she's going to be a veterinarian when she grows up. If she needs money to pay for college, she says, she'll work at an ice cream stand.

My friends call me Shorty or French Fry or Shortstuff. No one uses my real name. They call me Shrimp, too. That's my nickname. I weigh 52 pounds, don't know how tall. I don't eat much and I'm real skinny, but I'm strong.

I've always been a good climber. My mother tells me I used to climb out of my crib and all over the furniture. Now, I climb all over our playground (at Gulfport Elementary) on the rainbow climber and on the monkey bars. At first, I couldn't hang upside down without using both hands, but now it's easy. It just turns my face red when I'm like that for a long time.

My mother used to climb on these monkey bars when she was a student here. She was a good climber, too. She's told me lots of stories about her friends and about this playground. It's my favorite place at school; it makes me feel good, and I'm sad that we have to leave it.

Coach (PE teacher Paul Hanson) told us that it would always hold a place inside us and that it would never go away in our heart. He asked us to write on our favorite thing in the playground. Normally, if we wrote on something at school we would get in trouble, but not today.

I wrote on everything. The monkey bars, a sign, the concrete, the basketball poles, the trees. I used a red marker and I wrote, "I Love Gulfport Elementary, I Will Miss Gulfport Elementary." I wrote my name and I drew little people with sad faces, and I wrote down no. 4, because that's my softball number.

The things we wrote will fade away from the rain and sun, and someone is coming to knock everything down. We talked about that in our class, but I agree with coach. It'll never go away in our heart.

-- My Dream is a feature in which people discuss their goals and aspirations. It appears Saturdays in Floridian.

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