Adoption

Today I contacted the City about officially adopting the park.

The response:

Thanks for your inquiry to adopt Forest Hills Park, as you may know the Park is in it’s final stages of planning for revisions to the Park. Unfortunately the revisions will be on hold due to current budget restrictions in the City. In the mean time Park adoption usually includes trash pick-up, (which you kindly already do) mulching landscaped areas, simple weeding etc. You may wish to only do a targeted task such as trash pick up. We can provide bags, gloves and a trash picker as we don’t recommend handling trash. At the point when plans for renovation of the Park are possible there will be many lovely landscaped areas to oversee and water when necessary. If you wish to continue on in your present capacity it would be greatly appreciated just let me know. When future plans begin there will be many more interesting tasks at hand and certainly your involvement will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

This is swell. But I cannot imagine myself with gloves and a trash picker.

Recently I’ve been bemoaning my age – I see the wrinkles around my eyes and realize that the good ole Ravages of Time have begun their necessary tasks to take me down, and I’ve been having visions of myself as an Old Lady – sucked dry like a hunk of beef jerky on a late-night infomercial, sitting tidily in my translucent box, happy to oblige the hungry, younger generations their need to preserve me and then chew me into pieces as a midafternoon snack.

But gaw, that’s still all in my imagination – a trash picker would really seal the lid on the tupperware deal. I’m all for eccentricity, but I’m already earning Neighborhood Goof title by singing out my buoyant, geeky Hello!s to the boys in the hoods. Give me a trash picker and gloves from the City and any aspirations I yet maintain to blend in will be trampled… and picked and bagged and tossed, like all the other litter awaiting its fate in the wintering grass…

I remember when I was about 12 I promised myself that, unlike all the other adolescents I’d read about /witnessed, I wasn’t going to fall victim to the illusion of immortality, ride high on any kind of faith in safety from my vulnerable human state.

But I did; not because I forgot about my promise, but because death not only feels remote and far away – something to worry about in what seems to be the very distant future – but there’s a weird trap that opens up in your mind, an argument that forms that says you are not like other unfortunate souls who suffer an early demise – you do so easily wrap yourself in an odd, demented sense of immunity…

As I get older, and the things that seemed so far in the future occur, smacking me silly with the flat hand of Time, I listen to my grandmother, for instance, talk about her loneliness, and I think, darn it, darn it, it’s all going to end in tears. Her brothers and sisters are dead, her husband is dead, and her best friend is so deaf they can’t talk on the phone the five times a day they have done their entire lives.

I can’t run away from it, aging, and death. But I can save the trash picker for the lonely times when eccentricity is all I’ve got. For now, I’ll pick up trash on the downlow and thrash out the end of my youth like it’s a mosh pit… you know… rage against the dying of the light… at least until it’s time to do tai chi and wear comfortable pants and then, however wrinkly and bereft I’ve become, I’ll have the trees to be with, because the City is leaving them up for now, and I’ll go before they come down.

That’s my hope, at least. The hope I’ve adopted.

An Introduction

Graffiti on the blacktop

The first time I ever went to the park, I found a used, blue condom on the toddler play structure. Gang signs swirled over the arches above the slide, where splayed a red kerchief that made me think of gang colors I’d first learned about in junior high, when I lived near LA and our eighth grade sadie hawkins dance had a shooting incident due to someone wearing a valentine dress.

Ah, memories.

My daughter was about a year and a half, and the place was empty, until a couple little girls, one black, one white, sprang out of the grass to play with us, shouting, as kids do, “Watch me slide! Watch me! Watch!”

I remember the contrast of the noble, arching oak trees to the scraps of plastic drink containers and Bud Light bottles left forlorn and ugly and random across the thick grass.

I fell in love with the park, and when a house went on sale right next to it, a year later, I wanted it, badly.

Something about the park’s scrappiness, it’s disheveled nature under a benevolent composure of trees, made me feel at home the way neater, newer, more straight-laced parks did not.

But I’ve never quite fit into newfab surburbias or fancypants gentrified cityscapes. I’m not claiming any kind of street cred I don’t have; it’s just where I come from. I shop at the Salvation Army because I like the gems and the crap, and I like them mixed together. Rows of mass produced shirts at Sears give me the hives. And I myself usually have an untied shoelace, a hole in the armpit of my shirt, an ignored sauce stain on my sweater. It’s not that I like being unkempt, or that I relish the trash in the park – it’s that I’ll live with rattiness if there’s something else more magnificent and important going on – something muscular and fanatic and unique, if there’s soul.

If there’s spirit, soul, delight, irreverent humor, zinging out of a person, place, or thing, I can overlook – no, I do overlook – I don’t see the spiderwebs, the tears, the zigzags in the part. I don’t see; I don’t care.

This is not genetic, this flaw of mine, to love flaws. My mother and my grandmother exist to scrape away every possible dirt molecule that would take up residence on a kitchen counter; they pursue errant hems with the stubborn rigor of terminators; they forgo the health of their bones and ligaments to ensure that the laundry is done, the stains eradicated, the sheets ironed, shoes shined, the front stoop swept and washed clean and fresh.

Their efforts impress me – shame me – highlight evermore my incipient slovenliness.

But theirs is not my talent.

I’m not good at reforming the dirt; I’m only good at seeing it for its inherent richness; and it feels more real to me to love the uncouth, the crass, the malformed.

To love the park, and its people, even if they don’t know how to use the trashbins properly.

Look at this piece of art! Look at this friggin trash!

How interesting!