To the editor:

The gates at the high school track have been locked as part of the town's new liability avoidance program. The first step in this program was to raze the Peck Playground (nobody will get hurt there now), and the third will begin in June, when we start cutting down all the trees in town so children can't fall out of them (after all, many more children have been hurt this way than at the playground).

Several years ago, my wife and I spent many hours at the Peck Playground with our young grandson. We had no trouble "tailing" him through the equipment, even though we are both in our sixties. We felt the need to watch him closely because a playground inherently lends itself to the possibility of injury. (The greatest danger to him at Peck, interestingly enough, came from some children who ran wild through the equipment while their caregivers sat and chatted with their friends.)

When we took our granddaughters to the much newer and more modern playgrounds in Arlington, Mass., where they live, we watched them just as closely as we did our grandson at Peck.

Should we modernize our playgrounds? Of course we should.

Will the modernization make them injury proof? Of course they won't.

There are three things that will never be invented: a perpetual motion machine; a squirrel-proof bird feeder; and an injury proof playground.

My grandmother used to say that you can't put an old head on young shoulders and that's why God gives us parents.

Tom Russell

32 East Side Drive