It’s a warm, sunny May day, and I’m at Mt. Lebanon Park with my son. That is, my son, who is 22. Not 22-months. Twenty-two years. If you’re wondering why I would take my college-aged son to the playground…well, it’s been a while. Actually, it’s been about 15 years. And we wanted to see if one of his childhood haunts had changed.

Other than my college years and early 20s, I’ve called Lebo home for most of my life. So, I’ve come to know Mt. Lebanon’s main park very well. My earliest memories of the park aren’t with my son. They’re with a babysitter who, based on what I can remember, had an extremely brief tenure with my family – and for a good reason.

One night, when I was maybe four (at most), she took me on a short walk from our then-Austin Avenue home to the park. I don’t remember much. But I do recall sitting on a picnic table under a pavilion, watching her and her friends graffiti their names onto the vaulted wooden ceiling. Needless to say, when I told my parents about our “adventure” to the park after-dark, they were less than pleased.

Back then – in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s – Mt. Lebanon Park had the same rolling green hills you can see now. That’s pretty much where the similarities end. A wooden climber with a hamster wheel contraption sat on a sparse bed of wooden mulch. A rusty metal merry-go-round that always seemed to go just a little bit too fast for my tastes, bumpy metal slides that scorched your skin in the summer sun, hard plastic swings with twisted chains and possibly the best concrete tube slide a preschool-aged kiddo could ask for filled the park with scandalously dangerous play opportunities galore.

By the time my own son was ready for the park, the wooden play structure, slides and merry-go-round were all but distant memories. The main park of his youth centered around a metal and plastic climber, smaller slides and a few random swings. Honestly, he spent most of his park time grinding his teeny tiny feet through the bare dirt, making what he called “smoke” from an imaginary Thomas the Train. Other than a few older swings, the only remnants of the park I remembered were the pavilions and mulch-covered ground.

On the unseasonably humid May day that marked our return to the main park, my now-22-year-old son looked at the playground and said, “I don’t remember any of this.”

Well, that’s probably because it wasn’t there 15 or so years ago. Padded protective turf covers the ground instead of hard dirt and mulch. Smaller, architecturally styled equipment now takes the place of the large metal climber and the other parts of the early 2000s playground my son remembers. Like the metal slides and merry-go-round of my own youth, my son’s beloved play place is long gone. But not everything is different. The curved rock walls he used to climb and the gravel-covered dirt path between them are still very much there.

As my son casually leans against the wall, brushes his long curly hair out of his eyes and scratches his very grown-up-looking beard, he admits that he has no memory of dragging his feet through the dirt, chasing after his friends and shouting, “Make way for Thomas and Percy!” That’s okay. I can’t expect him to remember everything.

Before we head back to the car, a rowdy band of children dash past us, laughing and screaming their way from the grass and onto the newly padded play area. We both smile. Even though Mt. Lebanon Park may not look the same, nothing has really changed.