A Walk in Prospect Park

In addition to the fading glory of the foliage, the oceans of fallen leaves underfoot, the joggers, and the runners, this is what I saw and heard last Sunday morning during my daily walk in Prospect Park.

I saw a father blowing bubbles towards his child, perhaps 20 months old, who toddled towards him trying to catch a bubble, while his mother watched.  I saw a beautifully combed and brushed brown and white Springer spaniel. I heard a father saying to his child, “See all those runners?  Where do you think they’re going?” I didn’t catch what the child said but the father laughed.  The question was a good one, for the runners weren’t going anywhere. I saw ten ducks swimming in the dog-paddle pond, across which a barrier had been thrown to keep dogs from venturing onto the ice that often forms in winter. I saw four guys throwing a football to one another and four guys line skating in close formation.  I saw several phalanxes of racing cyclists.  I saw a dog playing fetch with his master on the Long Meadow.  This was after nine, when dogs are not supposed to run free. 

A woman smiled at me (was she thinking, “isn’t he cute?”).  She was standing next to a man. A tall, well-turned out couple in their forties, watching the dog playing fetch, they looked the essence of “U.”   I smiled back and said “good morning,” which they repeated to me.

I saw the homeless man I wrote about in Monday’s post.  He was sitting on a rock outside the Endale Arch.  He was talking to a woman with a dog, so I heard him speak for the first time.  He has a West Indian accent.  (The next day I saw him hunched up against the wall, all but his head buried in blankets.  He looked at me.  I called out “good morning” and he replied “good morning, sir.)

I saw a special bench on the path that runs parallel, more or less, to the East Drive.  What makes it special is that for a long time several photographs of a twenty-something young man had been affixed to it along with the dates of his birth and death and a note to the effect that he had died of cancer.  A bouquet of flowers, replenished from time to time, was placed next to the photograph.  But the bench had neither photographs, nor note, nor flowers.  And I thought of the tragedy of the young man’s early death.

And of course I thought how lucky I’ve been to have lived so long (yesterday I turned 80).  For many old people the notion of “golden years” is bitterly ironic, if they are beleaguered by straitened incomes or poor health or the loss of a beloved spouse.  My old age, though, has been truly golden so far, if enjoyment of life is the chief criterion.  Let’s see what happens next, now that I’ve joined the ranks of the octogenarians.  Whatever comes next, though, I won’t have any grounds for complaint.  I've had a good run.

2010-2011 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

Two Walks

On a brisk autumn morning the other day, as I walked in Prospect Park, the orange and yellow foliage glowed. Mist rose from the Long Meadow, where dogs, permitted off leash until nine, ran alone, frolicked with one another, or fetched the balls that their owners had thrown out for them. Younger runners and bikers passed me as I walked as fast as I could on the West Drive. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and the air was just cold enough to provide a pleasant briskness. What a marvelous day, I thought to myself, and then felt a deep gratitude that I was again able to walk without pain.

And then I remembered the cartoon by the late, great William Steig that I clipped out of The New Yorker Magazine years ago and placed in a plexiglass frame. It shows a man floating in a sun-dappled sea, his head on an inflatable pillow, his hands clasped on his stomach. He smiles blissfully. Beneath him swims a dreadful sea monster. The caption: “Complete Peace.”

And that reminded me of a spring day during my sophomore year at college. I was a staffer on the college paper and well on my way, so I hoped, to becoming a Big Man on Campus. I was enjoying myself so much at college that I said to myself that “this is too good to last,” although I had no idea about what could derail me. I didn’t know that my mother was dying, that in another month she would be dead, that I would transfer to a college near home, drop out of campus life, and live at home, where I could help my grieving, shell-shocked father raise my younger brother and sister.

These two walks, one on the quadrangle of a college campus, the other on the West Drive of Prospect Park, are separated by more than 60 years. In both cases, I felt the intimations of darker times to come. The difference is that when I was 19, I had little experience of catastrophe, and I took for granted the good things life had given me. Now I know what catastrophe means, and I’m grateful for every day.

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