Sol Packer

A few weeks ago I underwent a simple prostatectomy, an outpatient procedure that’s not a big deal.  It was the third reduction, over the past twenty-one years, of my prostate, that almond-shaped organ that continues to grow even as my need for it has diminished.  According to the instructions received at the hospital, I was not to exercise or to carry anything heavier than ten pounds for two weeks.  The two weeks passed a few days ago, so the other day I ventured forth for a walk in Prospect Park.  It would be a greatly truncated version of my usual walk, I decided.  I’d walk only to the first traffic light on the West Drive and then return by a parallel path. 

The park, at the height of its spring brilliance, with flowering dogwood, azalea, magnolia, and cherry, seemed an ideal place in which resume my career as intrepid walker, but the mild inclines upward from the Grand Army Plaza that I had ignored but a month ago now appeared as formidable obstacles to my progress.  My thigh muscles began to ache and I had to stop to catch my breath.  A walk that would have taken me no more than 20 minutes a month ago, now required at least twice as much time.  I received a vivid lesson in the adage, “use it or lose it.”

Feeling slightly sorry for myself, I sat down on a bench facing the Long Meadow.  On one of the bench’s back slats was a small plaque:

In memory of Sol Packer

who played volleyball with his friends

on the Long Meadow

1982 – 2006

No more than 24 years old when he died, the young man was probably still unmarried, probably still childless, probably at only the beginning of his career.  Even today, he’d be no more than 30, still a kid.  He’d hardly lived before he was taken from those who loved him.  My self-pity vanished as I felt pity for him and his family and realized how lucky I’ve been to have lived so long, able to feel my muscles ache and my breath come short, able to admire the flowering trees on the other side of the Long Meadow.  If my walk in Prospect Park reminded me of the importance of continued exercise, it also reminded me of the unfairness of life.  I can’t do anything about the young dying prematurely, but I can keep myself vertical for a little bit longer by returning to regular exercise.  And from now on, I'll look for Sol Packer's bench as a reminder of the fragility of life and of its preciousness even at 80.


2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Compassion

Prospect Park is one of New York’s glories.  Unlike Central Park, it offers you the illusion of being in open countryside, where you forget you’re in the middle of a great  city.  The illusion is broken in some places, though.  When walking towards the Grand Army Plaza, for example, along a path parallel to the West Drive, Richard Meier’s One Prospect Park, a new condominium on the corner of Plaza Street and Eastern Parkway, rears its glass façade well above the trees, providing an unwelcome reminder that you’re in a city.  You avert your eyes from the building, but soon you come to the Endale Arch, a pedestrian underpass near the main entrance to the park.  There you can see a peculiarly urban phenomenon, a homeless man.

When it’s not raining, he sits on a rock at the entrance to the arch, reading a book.  In inclement weather, he lies inside the arch – a structure perhaps 30 feet long – on the ground along one wall.  Resting on several blankets, with a small bag containing his possessions, he’s a dark-complexioned African American of middle age, wearing a hooded parka.   

The other day when I passed him, I did not avert my eyes from him, as I did from One Prospect Park.  Unmoving, unblinking, he stared at me in return.  As I strode past him, I remembered another homeless man who occupied the nearby Meadowport Arch, whom I passed daily for several years.  Also an African American of middle age, the Meadowport homeless man appeared more put together – his clothes well pressed, his beard neatly trimmed - than does his Endale counterpart, who looks as if he has just  tumbled out of a spinning dryer. 

I wrote about the Meadowport man in July of last year, in a post called “Too Late.”  It was too late because after passing by that man for several years, he disappeared.  The bench he occupied inside the arch was empty of his neatly folded blankets and his pile of paperback books.  Where had he gone?  What had become of him?  And I regretted never having greeted him, never having said hello, although I admitted that had he continued living in the arch, I probably would never have done so.

I can no longer greet the Meadowport man, but I can do so with his counterpart in the Endale Arch.  But should I? Would it be at all appropriate?  Would he interpret it as condescension?  Would he even notice?  I believe he would, because unlike the Meadowport man, who seemed enclosed within a private glass cylinder, the Endale man seems alive to the world around him, at least as evidenced by his staring at me.  He must be lonely, but perhaps he wants to be let alone. 

This week our Mussar group is considering the trait of compassion.  That I feel sorry for the Endale man goes without saying, but compassion must be expressed if it is not to be empty.  What expression can I give to my compassion for him?  Giving him money seems out of the question.  He doesn’t ask for it and he might be insulted by the offer.  If his apparent isolation is painful to him, perhaps a greeting would be welcome.  On the other hand, perhaps he would interpret it as an offense to his dignity.  I will probably continue to do nothing at all, just as I did with the Meadowport man, and when and if I no longer see him, I will again regret my inaction.  But no man is an island, entire of itself.  When I pass the Endale man, I hear the bell tolling for me.  If only I knew how to respond.


2010-2011 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved