What is it about the sound of fun?

I like children a lot. Not all adults do.

Witness the battle of the bells, which was no battle at all, it turns out. After one adult complained, a row of brightly coloured bells was briskly removed from a children’s playground in the Annex, a downtown Toronto neighbourhood of affluent people who should know better.

The ringing had annoyed someone — The Bickersons Call 311, Ep. 342” — but had brought great joy to toddlers in the juiced-up miniplayground next door. There is something about the sound of children enjoying themselves that drives some people spare.

Pandemic kids have lived abnormally small, unsocial lives for two years now. What ho, here be bells to ring, swings that touch the sky, slides that reach speeds of 30 metres per hour, bridge-and-tunnel contraptions to climb up, into and around, a sandpit full of dinosaur bones, all things that frankly leave me cold.

My tastes are adult. These days, my social style is meeting strangers at a designated snowbank outside an Ossington coin laundry to buy an Ikea table lamp that was $9 cheaper on Kijiji. There’s nothing I won’t do to get out of the house.

I’m all about lamps now. Is that a spider fitting or a reversible gimbal? Empire or drum? Go ahead, test me. Same with furnace filters and car mats. I’m not alone in this. Competitive boring will be an Olympic sport in 2024. I will win for Canada.

Back to the world of children, which is so much lighter and brighter. Kids love novelty, amplitude, big tales.

The gentle and amorphous “sharing is caring” is the core message of modern child-rearing but it doesn’t really work with children, and of course not with the notorious Mr. Bellend overlooking Joseph Burr Tyrell Park and Playground in the Annex.

“But I don’t like sharing,” a toddler tells me with great sincerity, as primed for injustice as any antivaxxer. “Not fair!” jets out of agitated toddlers, just as “my body, my choice” does from the Jims and Janices protesting outside Toronto hospitals.

(Do I see a pattern here? Like some anti-vaxxers, toddlers are poorly educated. They wear little bunny ears on their pink toques like the wellness moms and slogans on their snowsuits like the Freedom Dads.)

But I like sharing my homemade warm blueberry crumble on a snowy afternoon, I cry. I made it because I’m caring. About you. So sad you don’t like sharing, my little friend.

I have sunk to this, mainly because it works. It’s blackmail that leaves everyone happier and better off.

Small children like things. Adults are just another kind of thing they like. Children are in the world, not of it.

I love their taste for novelty, their affection for helpless objects, mainly presents, their rubbery love that always bounces back, the way they say, “Can I tell you a secret?” and offer a story so off the wall that you’ll need an Apple AirTag to trace its origin.

My experience of adults, at least right now, is that they don’t like things generally, not you, not themselves and certainly not children. They don’t like presents, they prefer cash. They are walking case studies for newspaper advice columns.

The news I’m reading right now is all about human beings at their least childlike, at their shabbiest really.

This worries me. Almost every adult I encounter each day behaves in the best way they can. I don’t read about them.

What I read about is the kind of adult we wouldn’t wish our children to meet. I’m covering kids’ eyes and ears as they bellow and menace.

Adults like this shout that Anne Frank had it easy, hiding from the Nazis in her fancy attic. They shout that they don’t like doctors or even teachers.

They don’t like the sound of bells.