In what is now called the inner
city the first experience a poor child has with outdoor frolic revolves
around the closest public park. My childhood park on 11th Street in Hoboken
swarmed with children unwilling to be stifled in drab tenement buildings.
The park was a sanctuary to more than gray squirrels. It was a second home
to latchkey kids who seldom saw their parents working opposite shifts.
I composed some of my very first attempts at poetry on a park bench my
grandmother told me once held my grandfather who died on it. Men after
World War II rarely sought psychological counsel after witnessing and surviving
the horrors of warfare. To do so was an admission of a weakness. My grandfather
drank himself into a stupor to drown out the pain coursing through
his shattered spirit. He fell asleep drunk on that bench on a cold winter
night and was promptly found by a patrolman the next morning: frozen to
death. Grandma said he looked at peace. Too bad she never did. I tried
to find some spirit, some inspiration, some type of connection with his
presence and my verse. It did not work like I hoped. My poem about my frozen
dead grandfather went over badly with my family. Grandma tore it up and
banished me to my room. Perverse as this may sound the incident galvanized
my efforts to write further. I sensed a power from writing I did not have
otherwise. For I was no athlete nor was I particularly handsome. But then
again I was only 8. Time heals all acne.
The power I discovered by accident was
the power to make my grandmother cry. That was not part of the grand scheme.
I was not comfortable with that aspect of it but somehow I knew this writing
thing was a useful vehicle to deliver the thoughts of my heart and mind.
Grandma was more forgiving after my "coolest grandma in the world" poem
was written. She was very supportive and I tried hardnot to hurt her feelings
again. In general the public park became a zone of contemplation for kids
who could not or did not want to spend their time home alone. All the kids
I knew from my modest background had a television but the reception was
lousy. You only could do so much with a metalcoat hangar. The day our fathers,
those of us who had one of them rare creatures, would call a TVrepairman
was the day he'd have to admit he knew nothing about TV repairing or had
less money than a soup kitchen wino. We knew that wasn't going to happen
any time soon.
The park was always open. The park did
not have these problems with pride and profit. It cared for us and we cared
for it.
Later in adulthood the "parkies," the
nickname we gave ourselves, could call upon those simpler park days to
soothe the grown-up realities of rent and relationships. The merry-go-rounds
and metal-linked swings that pinched your fingers were pleasurable escapes
from an existence none of us asked for but nevertheless were thrust into
and made to sink or swim. Some of my friends never made it. They found
more powerful escapes like drugs and criminal activities and paid with
their lives. The park helps me remember them the way they were: innocent
and ignored, by all, but their closest friends. Those of us who were able
to swim and make a life, made out well. We know wherever there is a park
there is an instant friend ready to welcome you home. I was the only writer
within the group. I have the responsibility to jot down these matters and
what they meant to each one of us. Sadly, my friends are not so in tune
with their feelings and their childhood's. Good men in all. But I couldn't
get three sentences strung out from the lot of them. Six of us met a few
times after I returned from the US Air Force. Our conversation and horseplay
increased in a restaurant or sports bar, but decreased as we approached
the 11th Street Park. Most of the guys were quiet and carried on with an
air of deep respect for the place. Some things had changed about the park.
The stone chess tables were gone. As were the monkey bars which were nearly
halved when lightning struck a tree which in turn slammed into the metal
frame of the monkey bars. That tree was more than a 120 years old. I missed
the Zebra and the giant building blocks you could hide in a game of hide
and seek.
The guys kept their deepest feelings
pretty well wrapped up like most men do. This is not a new revelation.
Most societies condition young men to hide their feelings for fear of being
considered weak or girl-like. In America I always wondered why women find
this so damn annoying; viewing it as an impediment to a healthy relationship.
I wonder due to the inconvenient ironies that inform me that the women
who usually raise poor city kids reinforce this very conditioning. I am
fully aware of the fact that keeping his feelings to himself after WWII
destroyed my grandfather before he had an opportunity to live a productive
life. I am aware of his generation and I am aware had he opened up to my
grandmother she would have listened and thought him suspect for the mental
ward. She would have thought him weak. These facts tend to elude our homegrown
feminists who prefer quick neat judgments to justify sloganistic platforms.
Simone de Beauvoir had it right, "Life is messy."
Speaking for the few enraptured by the
art of writing, a park can rekindle the desires of creativity kept cold
by life's cruel logic. I can now sit on a wooden bench, not my grandfather's,
mind you, but a wooden park bench and watch the trees sway, the squirrels
chase their kin and remember a childhood when I would make fun of a lonely
old man feeding the pigeons. I chuckle to myself about the old man's age
(usually owing Moses' money), his wrinkles (ye o' prune face) and how he
walked funny (bowel accident in underpants.) All with the mindless notion
my kiddie games would go on forever. All with the certainty I had some
special immunity to growing that old. Thirty years later you sit in that
same spot, mumble an apology to God and the nameless old man; listen to
kids making the same foolish assessments you once did. For a moment you
think the whole situation is cute until the realization hits you harder
than a yellow school bus: the old man you mocked is gone and you are here
to take his place.
A public park is an urban oasis. It teaches
there is more to life than the artificiality of brick houses, concrete
sidewalks, iron horses and smiling landlords. The park is alive with a
distinct sense of life one can easily miss in the confines of a mechanical
world. Beyond the imperfections of family, church and society, the park
gave wayward children a better understanding of themselves and the world-at-large.It
nearly forces you to make friends with others society prefers to pit against
each other. You learn early in the park that it somehow serves as a natural
instrument of healing by bringing together inreality what hollow words
and nice wise men fail to accomplish. The cynics walking among us need
to believe all I have said here is a form of romantic revisionism. I received
letters to that effect. As usual these cloudy-hearted clowns know the price
of everything and the value of nothing. What man knowingly wants to be
an enemy of common sense ? None come to mind. But such fools do exist and
have lobbied against parks as havens for beer-bums and drug deals. Ignoring
their own hypocrisy in taking hired women there to satisfy what they claim
is supposed to be addressed within the marriage contract. The same patrolman
who found my dead frozen grandfather on that frozen park bench catches
these two-faced finks. A public park is a form of poetic justice. A precious,
peaceful, civilizing force in the center of a whirling city. Call it an
eye of an hurricane, order in the midst of chaos or a spiritual gas station
filling the tanks of tired souls. For myself, my friends and my writing,
the park is forever associated with healing.; not harm, hypocrisy, or hubris.
City kids bear daily witness to the complexity surround them, even more
so thirty years later, and they notice with new eyes the parks have a renewing
simplicity. A local source of power never running dry. Never leaving your
side. The underprivileged offspring of urbana know from personal experience:
human beings often fail, the parks do not.
