There's a stretch of City Park in Columbus, Ohio, that most people only know for soccer fields and birthday parties.

And that's fair enough because if you drive through on a Saturday, that is what you see.

Minivans, folding chairs, somebody's uncle burning hot dogs on a public grill and acting proud of it.

I worked there for four seasons, not as a cop, and not as one of the cool national park people

with the broad hats and the horse and the dramatic rescue stories that get turned into the

good sort of internet content. I was a municipal park ranger, which in my case meant I wore a green shirt

with a patch, drove a pickup with a rotating amber light that nobody respected, unlocked

gates at dawn, locked restrooms at dusk, told teenagers to stop fishing in the fountain, wrote

incident reports, and occasionally had to explain to a furious adult man that geese are not,

legally speaking, harassing him on purpose.

I liked it. I really did.

If you ever want to know what kind of person you are, work in a public park for a while.

You will meet every version of humanity before lunch, people having first dates on benches,

people crying and parked cars, grandmothers power walking in pairs, talking trash about everybody

they know, dads trying to prove they still have an arm, and launching baseballs into traffic.

People who are very into birds, and I mean very into birds, to a degree that

starts to feel theological. And children, obviously, endless children. Which is where this starts,

because if I tell it in the order it happened, this whole mess really begins with a little girl

named Hazel, and the fact that my co-worker Emily thought I was being dramatic.

Emily had been with the department longer than I had.

She was one of those deeply capable people who never looked hurried,

even when she absolutely was.

...