Considerations on a Swim on a Summer Day

I just returned to my apartment after a late afternoon swim down there. Well, it was more a late afternoon float as I am not much of a swimmer. The sun was just brushing the shallow end of the pool when I got there, and though I went a couple of times to the deep end with a boogie board I got at the 99 Cent Store that I couldn't handle very well--I tried to sit on it and naturally it popped out from under me--I spent the largest part at the still slightly sunny end, allowing the water, and the sun to do what they do best, put me in an extreme state of relaxation. For some reason, not a lot of people in this building use the pool, me, a couple of times during a summer, the HOA President, and a couple of downstairs neighbors are about it out of a bit over 20 residents. That works for me, as there is something delightful about having the whole space to myself. And when it is as hot as it has been, so few people are going in and out that I feel as if the whole building is mine as I noodle in the water.

I think the pool is one of the favorite parts of my living in this location. The angle of the photo is the view I have when I am sitting on my terrace and I call it (to myself, and now to all of you) my "little lake".  All I have to do is go up a few steps after a swim and I'm home, out of the wet clothes and into the cozy dry. Now that's something I didn't have in the Bronx! I feel gratitude for this small amenity, more than I would have thought possible.

At one point, I simply sat submerged (except for my head) on one of the steps--you can see the rail there in the picture, where the steps are. I let my hands float free under the water. The water undulated around me gently. The sun was between two parts of the building and had that look you usually only see in drawings, the little triangular extensions of fire. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I noticed one of the local hummingbirds on a cactus by the wall watching me, and twittering. I closed my eyes again. And again when I opened them a minute or two later, the bird was still there. The sun, the weightlessness, the minute creature observing me--I was at complete peace.

Other than the twittering birds, the sounds were limited to the occasional bark of a dog and the mechanical hums of several air conditioners. As I sit tee shirted, shorts and bare footed on the terrace, another of my favorite parts of living in this location, I still hear the sounds of the occasionally barking dog, the twittering hummingbirds garnering the last of the day's nectar from my feeder, and the humming of the air conditioners, though the temperature has dropped significantly. And my old cat Bleu is taking a swig of water from my solar fountain.

Life is good.

"What If ?" Is Such a Waste

It's a very hot night in Los Angeles, at least indoors. The heat of the day isn't leaving my apartment so I have turned on the air conditioner. Oddly, though, it is cool enough (but humid for California) to sit outside in a soupcon breeze. I came out here to write. But then I found myself unable to begin. That happens often, but mostly because I cannot settle on a direction. Tonight, I have a direction, or a continuation of one that finds itself weaving through my blog, but one that seems to discomfit some of my friends who kindly read my words here. As to them it will come no surprise, I tend to write a lot about life and death. I think they (and others perhaps) assume that this focus comes from depression. Heck, I have been depressed more times than I can count, but my preoccupations in these pages isn't derived from sadness. It's just kind of not wanting to ignore what is plainly around me to be reckoned with, and in the reckoning, in an odd sense the hope that finally I will leave behind that fear and anxiety that has been too often an obstructive companion and kept me, to here, from many ordinary adventures. Hard to explain. We all deal with scary "what-ifs" in our lives, but I have carried my "what-iffing" to being a frozen figure on a plateau while others have courageously moved beyond me in what might even be considered basics, things like love, and family. They were willing, to paraphrase some line in one of my favorite movies, "Shadowlands" to take the pain with the joy. I often wasn't. Oh, I didn't avoid the pain. I just missed the joy.  I have noticed that Providence thus has placed certain things in my path, over I should tell you my vociferous objections, to get me out of speculative worry to face, to embrace, real life in all its facets. I have been so busy with the "what-ifs" that I ran before I engaged in far too much.




So what got me thinking about all this yet again? Well, two things, but I'll mention the first, and leave the second, a play I saw today, called "Constellations" to another entry. Maybe.

I was visiting my elderly friend as I do two to three times a week at a nursing home in Culver City. One of the Carmelite sisters was giving a presentation to a group of residents, and my friend was among them. I don't know that she recognized me immediately--I sense of late she doesn't always-- or maybe she didn't see me come in, but I didn't want to interrupt the proceedings, so I sat a short way off.  I noticed a new resident. She was clearly agitated, and trying to get up, though not steady on her feet, from her wheel chair. Sister managed to continue her presentation while attempting to soothe the woman by sympathetically caressing her back, but the woman's tears required a nurse to attend to her. She was taken to the nurses station which I could see from my vantage point, and she was no more calmed by their presence and ministrations. I could hear her asking to be taken to someone, I guessed a family member, who was not there. Probably, like so many of the residents, like my friend, she has dementia and is no longer able to care for herself and depending on its manifestations, neither is her family able any longer to take care of her. She shook all over as she cried to be rescued. from what is one of the possible inevitabilities of becoming ill. The staff tried to comfort her, to no avail. I felt for the nurses, as well as the woman.  Sometimes it just isn't all right, and nothing can make it so.

Each of us, if we don't die young, and quick, has to face the possibility that this might happen to us. I found it surprising that though it occurred to me that at some point in the not so distant future, I could be a new resident in a place like this, being led, as the Bible says to where I do not wish to go, I did not have an attack of the "what ifs".  I did book mark it in my head. I did also wonder that since I have been much of my life alone, and much of it, despite my often gregarious demeanor, a loner, whether I would seek rescue from an outside human source--even if I were compromised by dementia.

I am having a hard time with this entry. Not sure why. I think I am saying that I spent the first two thirds of my life worrying about things that might happen but were no where on the horizon. Now there are things most definitely on the horizon, and I am getting a preview, and somehow that jolt of reality is finally wrenching me from my old habit of "what-if", into more of a "What are you going to do now?" mode.  Maybe.

More than twenty years ago, someone I greatly respected. and trusted, exhausted himself in trying to get me away from my crippling "what-ifs" asked me that very phrase, "What are you going to do Djinna?" Before that, my father tried to logic me out of my cyclical thinking. They both hung in with me until, well, they died.  I spun my wheels. It's getting a little late in the day to keep spinning my wheels.

If spending time in a care home doesn't motivate me to deal with what is real, not potentialities I fear, then nothing will.

Long Ago Events that Give Us (Me) Pause

I was scrolling on Facebook the other day. Someone had posted a video of a French Canadian Priest, a Franciscan I think, giving a homily to a large crowd. It was some kind of convention. It was on the Feast of the Sacred Heart. He seemed robust. He was praising God, and His Son. He walked back and forth as he spoke, alert, alive. And then, he wasn't. He winced for a moment. Put his hand to the center of his chest, though he continued to speak of God without abatement. And then he fell down. And died.

I had the sense, though the Facebook post did not indicate so, that this was not a very recent event. In fact, it happened just over twenty five years ago, June 26, 1992. I wanted to know more about this priest, beyond the capture of his death on live television. I could find almost nothing other than he founded an order, and of course, that he was a speaker. But I could not even locate an obituary.

It's not like I don't know that people die all the time. I have been to enough funerals. I have been in a room just as someone (both my parents) died, or just after. It is no surprise that we can go from life to death in a fraction of a moment. But I have never seen it quite like this. Fr. Hurtubise wasn't (apparently) sick. When he died, he was doing his job. He died, literally, on the job, smack in the middle of daily life.

In some ways, it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with me. And then in a flash, I know that it does. It doesn't scare me, precisely (unless I happen to be in an airplane flying across country in which all I can think about is the descent of the plane and the inevitable result), but it makes me a little mad at myself. I have lived in perpetual anxiety. Since I was retired from my job, there are fewer triggers for that anxiety, but it still rears its ugly head, cyclical thought and doubt, resolve and doubt again about the least thing. And seeing this video somehow put my life long fears into the realm of the absurd, at the same time knowing that it is unlikely (at this age) I shall ever allow life to unfold without trying to control it with my defense mechanisms. They waste life. I have always known that. I have worked hard to temper these fears, but still I have not lived as I could have for their niggling at me.

Cliche's come to mind, like that old chestnut, "Live in the moment". Well, that's all very well if you have no responsibilities. We all have some responsibility, some more than others. And yet, in observing the small distance of the fall of the priest from homilist to deceased, the phrase rumbles as an exigency in my mind.

The Benedictines have a motto, "Keep death daily before your eyes." They don't mean worry about it, as worry, I have come to know as one who did it endlessly, kills joy.  But recognizing that there are things to do now, in this moment, which may not be available in the next. They, of course, are also talking about preparation for the eternal journey, which they, and I, believe in. Maybe that's why I wanted to read more about Fr. Hurtubise. I wanted to know about what had gone before in his preparation for that moment when he felt that twinge and left the world.

Wherefore July 4?

I just came home from the Fourth of July celebration at the Hollywood Bowl. There was a time when I would return from a lively fireworks display by the professionals and that would be it. Back to the routine. Back to relative quiet. But tonight, I notice, there seem to be an abundance, more than I can remember in the past, of such displays. The sounds, the explosions are all around me. No doubt the people are enjoying their displays as much as I enjoyed mine. But as I was sitting here on my terrace hearing the rattle and boom around me, to the left and to the right, it occurred to me that if this were 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, the announcement of the unalienable rights of all human beings, the sounds I am hearing would be those of cannon and musket. What I would not hear, at least from this safe distance, would be the thud of bodies of boys dying for those rights.

I'd like to think that all the fireworks are a remembrance of those long dead boys, commanded by General Washington, and overseen by a group of flawed men who understood history and philosophy and theology and how they intermixed and gave us the Laws of Nature and Nature's God from whence human rights derive. But I fear not. Oh, yes, I saw on one of the memes that one station of another read the whole Declaration today, thus presumably proving that Americans "get it"--the essence of the document of our founding as a people, endowed by the Creator with those rights by which we pursue Life, Liberty and Happiness. But to me, these debates back and forth which focus on the accidents of the personalities of our politicians miss the real point, we are locked in a battle that will determine whether the United States makes it to its 300th year, or even, to its 250th a mere 9 years away.  Government here was created to serve the Natural Law and the rights of people under that Law, not to supersede the Natural Law and eradicate the Creator who endowed us with the rights under which this nation was founded.

When I hear that the Declaration and the Constitution, which is its critical complement, are fluid and rights are engineered not via the Natural Law but via human feeling enforced by the fiat of the powerful among us creatures, I find myself despairing.  This small oasis in the world, as close on earth to the Paradise we threw away in our first effort to grasp at being gods on our own terms, is on the edge of ruin.

Yes, many of the Founders had slaves, but they planted the seed of its destruction, the first nation to do so, less than 100 years down the road, in the very documents that constituted the country. I hear this objection to them as if the Ideas to which they strove become irrelevant when flawed human beings fail to live up to them. There is this narcissism today that we, sitting in front of our technological advancements are somehow more enlightened, better, than these White, Male, Europeans. I am trying to see how we are better. We are as vile to one another as ever was any citizen of any now long dead civilization. All truth is relative, so whether one person is living up to a good is a moving goal post, and dependent once again on the vagaries of whomever has the voice of authority and whoever trains the next generation.

We have saved ourselves from smoking (although I note young people smoking more and more for all the warnings, exhortations and bluster), but we have been killing our children for decades--a right not under the aegis of Nature's God, but the god of euphemism.

In a moment of despair, I might consider the booms of celebration I am still hearing at nearly eleven thirty, the death knell of America. But I have great faith in Nature's God, and that faith generates hope, and with Grace, hope will generate charity in the face of a world I no longer recognize.

Nights in White Satin: Forty Years on with the Moody Blues

Ah, the opening night of the Hollywood Bowl, how I love it! I love it especially when the summer weather is perfect, warm and breezy, cerulean blue sky morphing into a cool but comfortable dark evening. Len and I had our concession meal and people watched the baby boomers, like ourselves, though given the range for our generation, 1946 to 1964, some quite a bit older than us, take their seats with greater or lesser ease. The vagaries of physical health have affected us all differently. Yes, there were walkers, and some wobbling on the wide stairs. The man across the aisle from me reminded me of two people, both long gone. He was slim and bald, except for side hair, with glasses, a cross between my very serious late professor, Fr. Francis Canavan, S.J. and a more smiling Lin Kissane, with whom I used to work at the State Bar. It was hard to imagine him a young man, and much easier to remind myself of me as a young woman, beginning my course work at Fordham University, tentative and lacking confidence in my social skills.

The first half was pleasant enough, a yearly presentation of the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles participating with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in a Shostakovitch piece. And then three of the original Moody Blues took the stage (I had to look that up, I had no idea who was alive, dead or replaced for other reasons). Voices were several octaves lower in capacity, but with the orchestral support to which the music of the Moody Blues always lent itself, I could have imagined myself and the rest of the white haired crowd back in the long ago day. It was a little incongruous, as such concerts, like the Eagles, or Steely Dan, or whatever the retro band playing usually are, this psychedelic music counterpoised against the harsh reality of time passing not only for us, but the guys on the stage. It is always a bit of a jolt to sense time's passing, but more so when clapping and singing along to the tunes of 40 plus years ago, when possibility was all and there was no sense of finality.

This paradox always moves me, to quiet tears in the darkness. The mind transports us back; the body, well, it stays firmly in the present, with its aches and pains and also with its joys and regrets.

The man across the aisle from me, who had had difficulty navigating the stairs, was singing along and waving his hands. I felt so much warmth for him.

By the time I got to Fordham, in 1972, Nights in White Satin was already an old hit, but a persistent one. The cycle of the day captured in a song. The cycle of lives. What would I be? Would I be a success? Would I love? I was sitting in our college basement restaurant, the Ramskellar, and I worried about how late a bloomer I was, and how inhibited and anxious about pretty much everything. Some things have worked out. Some others have not. Overall, I have developed wisdom enough to be grateful for the good things that have come my way.  And seeing perhaps the things that still may be.

"Isn't Life Strange"

Isn't life strange
A turn of the page
Can read like before
Can we ask for more?
Each day passes by
How hard man will try?
The sea will not wait

You know it makes me want to cry, cry, cry -
Wished I could be in your heart
To be one with your love
Wished I could be in your eyes

Looking back there you were, and here we are.

Isn't love strange
A word we arrange
With no thought or care
Maker of despair
Each breath that we breathe
With love we must weave
To make us as one
You know it makes me want to cry, cry, cry -

Wished I could be in your heart
To be one with your love
Wished I could be in your eyes
Looking back there you were, and here we are.

Isn't life strange
A turn of the page
A book without light
Unless with love we write;
To throw it away
To lose just a day
The quicksand of time
You know it makes me want to cry, cry, cry -

Wished I could be in your heart
To be one with your love
Wished I could be in your eyes
Looking back there you were:

Writer(s): John Charles Lodge 

"Seventh Sojourn" (1972)

Concert at the Hollywood Bowl, Moody Blues, June 17, 2017, Nights in White Satin

A Portrait of the Bronx Girl as a Poet--Ever so Briefly

As I have probably mentioned in these pages, the college radio station at which I volunteered when I was in college, required that the Sunday schedule be "educational" or "religious". When one of the professors, Vivienne Thaul Wechter, an "artist in residence" took a sabbatical from her WFUV-FM, show, during my sophomore year in 1974, there was a half hour opening the students were invited to fill. I proposed a poetry show, though I knew virtually nothing about poetry. So began "Poetry Because I Like It" later to be called "Poetry is for People", a program with a theme of poems ancient and modern. I waxed philosophical with a prepared script on a subject punctuated with poems that characterized the subject, "Love", "Loss", "Friendship", and yes, being who I am, "Cats".  I was reading T.S. Eliot on the feline long before the play ever opening on Broadway. I finally had one or two actual courses in poetry, and despite my many years' long radio show, I never really fell in love with it. But during one year or so, from 1975 until 1976, about a year or two after my mother died,
(though she had lived long enough to hear me at WFUV) too young at 48 or breast cancer, I found myself attempting to write some of my own.

Most were sad, as I tried to sort out the past, and my place in the world. I had been a "lapsed" Catholic since 1970--the reasons having to do with my inability to comply with certain of its precepts, and a view that it made no sense to demand my religion to conform to me rather than me to it, mixed with a bit of irritation that I had to be the one to conform. My mother's death did nothing to inspire me back into the religious fold. I wasn't angry at God. I had enough basic theology not to expect him to act as, what Dennis Prager calls, a "Celestial Butler". Prayer is not always answered, at least in the ways that we human beings dare to demand of God, forgetting that we are not the authors of life, but that He is. But also, I hadn't been enamored of the priest who celebrated my mother's funeral Mass, and who accompanied my father and I to the cemetery some distance away from the Bronx. His example, poor man never realizing it, sitting in the front of the car reading while we mourned in the back, was not likely to encourage me to re-explore my faith. I was silently seething at him. But then, after all, my mother hadn't been to Church for years. What did I expect? He didn't know her. She had never set foot in the parish out of which she was buried, Our Lady of Angels, on Sedgwick Avenue, except in death. My Dad, I think back fondly, nonetheless did the right thing by her, for which I am grateful to this day.



My days as a "poetess" --a name a kind, blind fellow student who was one of our fellow WFUV'ers, Rich Adcock, denominated me--at least one who actually wrote poetry, lasted from December 1975 when I was 21 until about July 1976, just after I graduated from Fordham. I've kept the efforts all these years, along with a myriad of other memories through which I now pour to pare or to dispense to storage of one sort or another. This blog is one place of "storage", the holding of memories.

The first one is undated and I suppose it sets the stage for my brief stint effort at iambic pentameter and other meters I knew not of at the time (like trochees, spondees, anapests and dactyls), so I begin with it.


The Muse poets have.
Not I.
To take thought mundane
Of Love
Of Life
Of Death
And create, with words
carefully arrayed,
a masterpiece of written art.
Philosophy profound.
Human life explained.
Oh, miniscule episodes
of earthbound dwelling
made momentous with
THE PEN!

⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫⧫

Toss and turn.
Almost every night I think
of her,
as my eyes burn with need of sleep.

Toss and turn.
Each night my mind searches for
concrete memory.
A moment caught. . .
No, it escapes too fast.
Wait!
Let me smile awhile
at what was said that day.

⧫

Toss and turn.
I must sleep.
There's time enough for memory.
Concentrate on glorious rest.
What!
The pillow is wet.
The swallowing comes hard.

Toss and turn.
God, I wish we could talk together.
Useless.
It is dark and
there is no one in the room.


⧫

Is this not the same beautiful child who
on a warm morning in May
in that year long forgotten
donned wedding gown and veil and
expectantly walked down the long, dark
aisle in silence, hands folded and head down?

Is this not the same purre girl
who received the Host-God into her heart
promising, publicly and silently, to
love her fellowman and who, in a
child's simple way vowed to live a
life worthy of St. Therese?

Grown now she feels futile frustration.
Did God die an unnoticed death with her
and continue to exist only in other hearts?
No more thinks she of faith that moves mountains.
Seldom thinks she of the Trinity--Father, Son,
or Holy Ghost.
God suited not her needs.
He answered not her needs.
Is that the reason?
No, sometimes it seems that God just faded away.
Didn't He?  Didn't He?

Still, strange force of heart
brings the once-child to walk down
a long dark aisle in silence
hands slightly folded and head down.
Alone in the huge Church
she looks toward the altar and
feels the Presence of God.
Yes.
This is the same beautiful child.

⧫

Christmas, 1960

Wide-eyed babe
is readied by mama for the evening to come.
Celebration!
The Lord is born!
This is the reason we go tonight.
Is it?
Six year old knows nothing of this.
Celebration!
Pretty girl child has vivid picture of
dancing, loud music, loud talk, drink,
DRUNKENNESS
Celebration!
Tot in red velvet dress cannot laugh
with the other children.
Off to hide, cry in a large empty room.
No one can hear.
Celebration!
Watch them.
Watch them open old wounds that came
before her time.
Again, the once a year
airing of petty grievances.
Do they know a child listens?
Celebration!
A new morning breaks.
A little lamb inwardly begs for
home and sleep,
sleep with which she will not be blessed.
Not this night.
Celebration!
Quiets descends on the worn family.
Thank you, God.
Leave now. No more
celebration.
Tired tot lies in bed.
Little eyes stare.
Little ears assailed with a deadly sound of silence.
Outburst from her beloved ones.
Celebration!
opened their old wounds.
Seething resentment,
hurts still linger.

A young woman readies herself
for an evening to come.
Celebration!
The Lord is born.
This is the reason she goes tonight.
She remembers tears of old.
In days gone by,
how she hated Christmas and
Celebration!

⧫

Security, blessed security
knowing that mother sleeps
next to father
as she always has.
It is a happy child who hears them breathe
rhythmically, peacefully.
The child smiles and feels the
Security, blessed security.

Change, fearful change
must never touch them
plaguing only others
as it always has.
But now, death comes.
Mother is gone
quickly, unjustly.
A child screams and curses the
Change, damnable change.

⧫

Childhood simplicity
was born
is lost
Left a ruin
amid hard complexity.

Childhood faith
was taught
is shattered
Left a whole
in old dreams.

Childhood dreams
I had
I need
They are remembered
at this moment.

⧫


There is nothing
so fearful
as
not knowing
of the future.

In the dark
so tearful
for
not knowing
of the future.

Closing the eyes
so hopeful
for
ever dreaming
of the future.

To find love
so warm
for
ever embracing
in the future.

⧫


I am sorry, America.

That fellow is laughing under
his breath at the sound of your
patriotic song.
He looks about him to see
if others think it's funny too
to love one's country.

I am sorry, America.

That child has never heard about
the founding of his nation
or its struggles to survive.
He hears that times are changing.
The past is better dead.
Disillusion is a lovely thing.

I am sorry, America.

A philosopher now wisely says
"Your past is an evil sham
perpetrated on the common man."
We must join to build a better future.
This is his joyful aim.
Utopia is the
mighty plan.

I am sorry, America.

That fellow is crying  in his soul.
He hates the sound of the people's song.
He looks about him to see if
others understand the pain of
his submission to oppression.

You have died, America.

⧫

He took a healthy
swig of his straight scotch
and he wheeled around
elbows on the bar
that kept him standing
and he shouted at
the unfeeling crowd,
"This drunk has no dreams!"

"Ya hear me, do you?
I just said somethin'
This drunk has no dreams!"
No one dared to look
but they heard him well.
"Let's get out of here.
These drunks always ruin
a good Friday night."

The barkeep barked now
at the offending creep
who slumped mumbling
and begged for more.
"Come on, old buddy,
just one little more."
Forget it fella.
Out he went, the bum.

Face in the cold snow
he whined and groaned for
the pain of being a nobody brings
slow death to the sould.
He sobbed and slobbered
and cried out in vain
for what might have been.

He took a deep breath
and shouted in rage
at a long-dead God,
"Damn them, it's their fault
this drunk has no dreams!"
He sprawled on the ground
while a late night crowd
stared and crossed the street.

⧫

I could not put my arms around her
and in one earnest time-suspended hug
express the love that overwhelmed me
for I was afraid.

I always had the deep affection
of my parents, given freely,
in a strange and hidden way.
I got what I never had earned,
the best of everything
and that indeed, is love.

But to touch, to speak of it, of love
a family of three
this I never knew.
Affection was implied but
implication is too subtle
for a starving child.

So my mother lay
with a year or less to life
and my heart ached to release
long dammed-up emotions.
I knew I needed her
and there was so little time.

⧫

His broad, strong hand reached out
and ever so gently stroked her cheek.
His two brown eyes searched hers
waiting for her to speak.
No words came but only
her smile to encourage.
His body edged closer
and his arms clasped hers,
and caressed it.
In the peaceful silence
she thrilled to the touch of his hand
in her long, flowing hair.
Certain, yet careful,
he leaned slowly forward
and pressed his lips against her.
She answered.
Warmth consumed them.
From this simple moment
to the final 'good night',
they knew
there would be other times.

Dallying on a Thursday in Central Park

I had a whirlwind week from June 1 till the 9th, until I jetted home on a happily turbulence free flight from New York City. It all began at a wedding in Plymouth, Massachusetts and until my hour or so sojourn in a small corner of the 2 1/2 mile stretch of bucolic oasis that is Central Park in the middle of a wildly busy Manhattan, I had been going non-stop. Nothing wrong with that; I enjoyed it all enormously. But after a late breakfast with my last remaining aunt on either side of my immediate family, at her favorite diner (The Flame) on Columbus Avenue near Lincoln Center, and a couple of hours before my cousin, Carol, was to meet us for a late afternoon visit, I needed to take in something of my environs alone. So much had happened in the preceding days. I hadn't digested most of it. I wanted to take a moment for quiet gratefulness. What better than a respite, as the sun tried hard to peek out, and a slight warming trend (from the 50s and low 60s) began, than in the Conservancy improved Central Park? I entered off 59th Street. I didn't need to go in far to find my spot, one of many benches with memorial plaques for city dwellers of the past.

When I left New York for the milder clime of California in 1981, the Central Park Conservancy was in its infancy and its task was herculean--to restore and preserve the Park which by then was a den for thieves and drug dealing, and brutality to those who would attempt to enter its manicured woods. I had probably gone through one of its gates maybe a handful of times, as a child with my father or some relative to the Children's Zoo, and a ride through on a horse drawn carriage, a requirement for after prom back in high school. Oh there was one time in 1987, by the lake, with a friend, when I was visiting after four years away from the city. I did notice then that there seemed an improvement in the surroundings, a little less fearsome, but I didn't much consider that there was intention behind it.

I didn't actually do much cogitating about my trip up to that moment as I sat on my bench, fat sparrows whisking by me lighting on iron fences or into the trees. A man in a suit accelerated on his skate board. A woman in jogging shorts stretched deliberately across from me. I could not help but note the depth of her bends which brought her ample rump into full view not only of me, but of those who skirted by her.  The horse drawn carriages are still doing their tours. I have never been quite comfortable with seeing the horses and their variously decorated carriages along Central Park West, lonely sentinels awaiting a tourist or two. At least these days they look healthier than I remember. There was a brief time, I seem to recall, when there was talk of getting rid of that New York attraction, because there was some rumor that the horses were ill-treated. I would prefer that they be free to roam in some truly rural atmosphere, but I admit that the park would not be the PARK, without them standing and clacking about. I was surprised, given the $52.00 price tag for a tour, that there were as many takers as passed me, having various landmarks within, and without the park pointed out to them. With Trump International vaulting into the sky directly behind me, I noted that every tour guide pointed out that particular edifice. Added to the tours are bicycle carriages, that must not be as regulated in price, for some offered rides for $3.95 a minute, while others, I suspect the very unsuccessful entrepreneurs offered a similar ride, in a less commodious cart, for one cent a minute.

A set of tourists, speaking French I think, as I picked out a few words, consulted a map regarding their next destination.

"Yes," I thought to myself, "if I still lived in New York, and worked in Manhattan, I'd spend time in here."  I probably wouldn't. I never actually visited, for example, the Statue of Liberty--though I passed it by a few times on the Circle Line.

I felt myself in full relaxation, breathing deeply, the New York air cleaner than it was when I was a child. A good place to meditate. A good place to say, as I did, the Rosary--imperfect pray-er that I am this place made it feel easy. Every once in a while, you have those experiences, sedate, peaceful, as I was in the Park that seem to presage what one hopes Heaven will be. I didn't want to leave, but it was time to move on. I saw a kiosk where I could get a souvenir of the Park, so I could contribute, ever so slightly to the continued maintenance of the space. I bought a T-Shirt, and also a book about the park, since I have never known a thing about it. Until that moment I am ashamed to say I never much cared.  Better late than never to honor those forward thinking men--in this case they were men--who late in the 19th Century orchestrated the creation of what they thought of as "public art", carefully placed trees, buildings, rock and water, that allows the weary New Yorker fuel for the soul and body.

I wasn't quite ready to return to Lincoln Plaza where my aunt lives, it still being slightly shy of the time to meet up with my cousin, so I got a Strawberry Acai Refresher at one of the ubiquitous (even more than in Los Angeles, if that is possible) Starbucks and sat on a bench in a garden mall on the median on 61st and Broadway, perusing my newly acquired book about Central Park. It was this absurd postage stamp spot smack in the middle of northbound and southbound cross traffic, maintained by the donations of the businesses surrounding the area. The birds were flying into the various spaces of light and other poles. I took in the cacophony.  And enjoyed it. A bird landed on the edge of the bench. It was glorious.