Prospect: A Year in the Park

Balancing act

Five o'clock, the end of October, the Long Meadow. With daylight savings time almost over, I struggle to keep the melancholy of the season from overshadowing the golden radiance of it. Discovering this guy practicing his mad tightrope skills between two flaming trees did the job.

I was drawn to the mesmerizing elm grove, below, the one on a knob of land near the "dog beach."

The knoll is carpeted with leaves, and the mostly bare branches seem to wave overhead like a circle of dancers. See the guy on a bike at right, in a gray jacket? The two other cyclists had asked him how old Prospect Park was, and he was telling them a little of its history, with perfect accuracy and great zest.

One more shot of the elms, from the other side...towering over dog walkers, stroller moms, kids walking home from school. The moon was out, a little pale disc, but it's just out of frame.

Philosopher hearts

As Daughter runs around Prospect Park with a track team, Mother pitches camp under an oak and lets the world unfold on the Long Meadow.

Little girl to father, left: "If you built a really big kite, you could attach yourself to it and fly into the air! I want to do that!"

The September sun gilds the grass tenderly; these pictures, frustratingly overexposed, don't capture the gold, or the tenderness.

Perhaps this artist did, despite the distraction of her lounging friends.

How can such sweetness be shot through with melancholy? Poets and dogs understand.

 

September's Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets--Crows--and Retrospects

And a dissembling Breeze

 

That hints without assuming—

An innuendo sear

That makes the Heart put up its Fun

And turn Philosopher.   

--Emily Dickinson

   

                        

Perks of membership

On a cool spring Saturday afternoon, the Prospect Park Alliance lined up all sorts of fun for its members. We got exclusive use of the pedalboats; fueled by hot dogs and watermelon, Spouse and I peddled doggedly under Terrace Bridge, while lazy Daughter lounged behind us. We passed swimming dogs, a meditating lady, and the snowy egret, who was coasting from tree to tree with his skinny black legs stuck straight out behind him.

The boats allow one to approach the islands from the water; I loved this scrim of phragmites in front of an apple tree whose fragrance wafted across the lake. However, I failed to spot any Interesting Ducks. Will I ever see anything besides mallards?








We did, however, see Marty Markowitz, as well as this Mr. Magoo-lookalike box turtle (a rescued pet, not a park native) at the Audubon Center. Both seem to relish their public duties, although the turtle did retract his head after awhile (Marty didn't, I doubt he ever does). There was also a huge hissing Madagascar Cockroach on display, which Spouse petted...he has clearly been working for a natural history museum for too long.  

The Lefferts House received a steady stream of visitors; they were making yarn at the "Flax and Fleece Fest." We opted instead for rides on the world's best carousel.










The phrase unlimited carousel rides must be among the most marvelous in the English language. (And Prospect Park members get 'em.) After ice cream treats, we went on twice; the calliope played "My Wild Irish Rose."


A bit tired for the walk home, we were tickled to board the trolley (or as I call this faux-trolley-bus, the Folly), which was exclusively for Us Members. It was stuffy and crowded with raging toddlers, but it dropped us off at the Peristyle a few blocks from home. Something about the entire outing felt very Victorian: an afternoon of good, earnest, fresh-air frolicking.

Heaven's gate

God bless Daylight Savings Time. At about 6 p.m. on a cool Sunday evening in March, the sun is still high enough over the Parade Grounds to break through the clouds and call forth a soccer ball to the Rapture. Of course, we will know winter is truly vanquished when those tennis bubbles deflate and disappear.

Younger than springtime are you

A perfect 60-degree afternoon on the Peninsula; who cares that Spring doesn't officially start until Friday? It's time for that adrenaline-pumping mass ritual, the Running of the Babies. Today it seemed as if every stroller in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace had converged on the park and liberated its inhabitant to toddle in the sun.


An admirably gender-balanced team in Spring training.

When my daughter was this age, we'd wait endlessly for a turn on these tire swings in the Vanderbilt Playground.




Kids weren't the only things sprouting.

Wahoo

Last Monday, was it really 10 degrees and blowing drifts of snow? At today's Greenmarket, the crowd seemed ebullient as the sun warmed Grand Army Plaza to 70 or so.

The forced hyacinths were out, and so were the tulips, and so were the bees. My borrowed camera, Daughter's little pink Coolpix, turns out to have some pretty kick-butt macro powers;  check out the nectar-sucking Double Bee Action.
















People on cell phones were mostly telling their friends where they were, and how wonderful it was.





We took a quick jaunt over to the Long Meadow, through the mysterious portal of the Endale Arch.

   

The Long Meadow was muddy, hazy, and dotted with grateful souls shedding their winter selves.

No wild beasts or angels

It had been more than a week since I'd taken a real walk in the park, and Ash Wednesday seemed as good a day as any to get back. Today marks the beginning of Lent, based on Christ's 40 days in the desert, where he was "among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him" (Mark 1:12). No desert for me, just the Long Meadow, where I quickly realized I'd forgotten my usual second layer of thermal woolies. Forget about 40 days; I didn't last 40 minutes.

The dogs were streaming in for their morning romp, insulated by joy against the cold. Which is the angel and which the wild beast in this meet-up? 







 


It was a quiet morning, the brutal winds of recent days having died down; I heard crows, doves, and of course starlings, which were cackling and wolf-whistling as they ate up the grass seeds on the Long Meadow. Even without the wind it was bitterly cold, but these eager daffodil buds inside the fence gave hope.





Nearby, this accidental signage made me smile, since the berm along Prospect Park Southwest has been the site of spectacular rat sightings in the past. No rats were observed today; they were either keeping cozy or avoiding the headlines.

I missed a jogging banana

Thanks to Louise of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn for passing along this wonderful shot by Tom Martinez of a mysterious jogging banana in Prospect Park. I've been getting over there less frequently during these sub-freezing days--okay, I've been slacking off and chickening out--and this is precisely the sort of thing I've been missing.

Oh, and also glorious hawks, also from the talented Mr. Martinez. I wonder if hawks eat giant bananas.

P.S. Thanks to Louise for organizing a convivial Blogade at "Delicious" in the Slope (their mac and cheese was great). Plans for the 2009 Brooklyn Blogfest are underway, and it sounds like it will be the best one yet.

Screams of joy

And not only in Washington, D.C. On a particular stretch of hill between the West Drive and the lake, conditions were ideal for slick, rapid coasting, and parents and kids were having a blast. An angular jogger paid them no mind on this frigid afternoon.

Tethered to a nearby tree, this noble dog was the picture of dejection as his guy and the baby sledded nearby.

Happy dog! The humans came to their senses and recognized their need for canine assistance, and he raced ahead of them down the slope.

The frozen lake lay under a blanket of snow, upon which some risk-loving humans had left excursionary tracks away from shore.

At the end: Desire lines and thin ice

My walk in Brooklyn's Prospect Park on the last day of 2008, my "year in the park," was much like my first and many others in between. I cut through the opened fence and the "desire line" worn by feet up to the South Drive. I love that term, desire line: a shortcut, but with the acknowledgment that sometimes shortcuts satisfy a real need, or just make more sense.





I passed a lone dad and daughter feeding the grateful Gluttonous Waterfowl. Few others were about in the falling snow...










...but, as almost always, someone had staked out some peace and solitude in the rustic shelter.

I passed my beloved Blasted Tree, taking comfort as always that it could thrive, even with its core destroyed, because its lifeblood flowed just below the surface of the bark. Who says deep is better than superficial?

A year ago, I wondered aloud in cyberspace whether a year of daily visits to Prospect Park could change my life.  To understand what this year has meant, let me tell you a signal moment—a danger sign, if you will—in my shared history with my mother in her old age. Once sharp-witted and tender-hearted, she had slipped into a deepening cycle of depression and disability. One summer evening, as she sulked on the couch before her array of pill bottles (none of which made her any happier), I suggested that we sit together on the porch and get some fresh air, which blows straight off the park to our house.

Why bother pushing the damn wheelchair out there? my mother responded. There's air in here.

Some folks spend a lifetime searching for the secret to happiness; in that moment, I intuited that I had stumbled on something perhaps even more valuable, the secret to perfect unhappiness. Why move? There's air in here. I carry half my genes from my mother's pool, in which swum a brace of robustly morose and self-obsessed Irish neurotics, several of them prone to dramatic suicide attempts. I do not mock her response as much as you might think; I've done time draped over the furniture, brain bloated with bad chemicals, barely motivated to breathe the air "in here," much less out there.

But the other half of my family tree, like the tree above, seemed to have gifts of astonishing resilience. My father, who never met a human being in whom he couldn't find some interest and goodness. His twin elder siblings, Don and Valeska, who lived to their mid-nineties defying a battery of physical ailments and frailties just to get out of the house, explore their worlds, and (especially in Don's case) take pictures, even when one eye no longer worked and his hands shook. (He produced some wonderfully impressionistic photos in this phase.) They would all have understood AYITP and come along for the walk, in any weather. They showed me another way forward, even into old age, beyond thin ice.

As I mulled all this in the softly blowing snow, music was borne out of the Wollman Rink on the wind. A young couple, poor-looking, with thin coats and no gloves, approached me and asked which way it was. Right over there! They headed off eagerly to skate away New Year's Eve. My thanks to everyone who has joined me on the journey, by reading, linking, commenting, or getting the calendar (still available). This little chronicle of my forays will indeed continue into 2009--I keep finding cool stuff and can't not share it, just as I promised, although for Google's sake I don't think I'll rename it "Another Year in the Park." Give my love to the fireworks at midnight tonight on Grand Army Plaza (I'll be away visiting friends, please send pictures!)...and let's go to the park again this weekend, okay?