How do I pick out a few mental snapshots from a lifetime of memories?

That was my dilemma on a Saturday last month as I helped volunteers install playground equipment at Burien's new Mathison Park.

I was there because that is where I grew up.

The volunteers were amazing as they lugged heavy pieces and expertly bolted them together. The completed "Big Toy" was a colorful sight to behold with slides and climbing walls. (As a kid, we had climbing structures, too. We called them "trees.")

Giving up part of their weekend to assemble the equipment were Burien residents, city employees, a couple of Mathisons, and Starbucks workers.

Burien Plaza Starbucks employees have adopted the park, which is ironic because Mom and Dad didn't drink coffee.

My late father donated the five acres to Burien in 1999 on the condition it be used as park. The Carver Family donated an adjacent acre.

"It is highly recommended that the property remain heavily wooded (my wife Bernadine loved trees)..." Dad wrote, as with "great pleasure and also trepidation," he turned over what had been the family home site since 1944.

Mom and Dad bought the place "in the country" from the Sunnydale Goat Dairy eight months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. (They always looked ahead, not back.)

My three brothers and sister may have different memories, but here are a couple of mine:

--While building our house, Dad would come home after work and lay ten or twelve cinder blocks each night. He built the kind of house you would expect from an engineer-solid and functional.

--The big kids digging out tunnels deep in the woods, putting boards over them, piling dirt back on and then playing inside. It was a great adventure. Today my parents would have been visited by social workers from Child Protective Services.

--When all I wanted to do in the summer was flop on the grassy hillside watching airplanes take off and land at Sea-Tac, I was ordered to toil under the hot sun picking strawberries and peas from Dad's garden.

After picking the peas, my mom and I would shell them into a cooking pan at the patio picnic table.

It's strange how incidents that, at the time, seemed like clear violations of child- labor laws, are now cherished adult memories. Having to mow the large field and massive lawn around the house is another example.

--Being forced to "go out and play" with my brother and sister because 'it's so sunny out." (Many times, it was pretty overcast.) Thus coerced, my brother, who became an architectural engineering graduate, designed little dirt-hill homes out of loose bricks and I, who became a writer, made up stories about the people who inhabited our dirt town.

--Our short mom, clad in her bathrobe, lecturing the burly utility workers out by the street about excessive trimming of the trees near the power lines. The workers stifled grins. Her children were mortified.

When Dad suggested pruning the trees to enhance the view, Mom would firmly reply, "The trees are the view."

--The annual summer picnics with Dad's four siblings and their ever-expanding families. They grew up on farms in Eastern Washington and Snohomish, so they appreciated the place.

--Walking to evening Boy Scout patrol meetings through the woods with a flashlight. The woods weren't scary, but those killer geese behind the chain link fence sure were.

Just because we lived on five acres on the top of a hill, I don't want you to think we were rich snobs. My dad was a Boeing middle manager. My mom took care of five kids and volunteered in the community. My parents were into voluntary simplicity before voluntary simplicity was cool.

It's funny that so many of my memories about growing up in a future park focus on the family and not the idyllic setting. It's the values connected to the place that have stayed with me, though I haven't lived there in nearly four decades.

I'm testing your patience with all this personal stuff because I want Burien officials and park patrons to know how important the place is to my family and me.

We look forward to the opening of the playground and, eventually, wooded trails with views of Mount Rainier, the airport and Puget Sound.

The benefits we received as kids we want to pass on to succeeding generations of children and adults.

Maybe the opening of our little neighborhood park is coming at an opportune time for local kids.

Richard Louv, in his book "Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder" quotes a fourth-grader who says, "I like to play indoors better because that's where all the electrical outlets are."

Louv suggests it's time for a Leave No Child Inside movement.

Officials at Public Health-Seattle & King County, worried about the childhood obesity epidemic and the possibility of today's teens developing heart diseases in their 20s, are urging youth to reduce TV and video time and "live outside the box."

Remembering a childhood where we played in the woods and rode bikes all over, it's ironic to realize that now days our chickens are free-range but our children are not.

Eric Mathison can be reached at hteditor@robinsonnews.com or 206-388-1855.