There is a hole in Midtown Manhattan. Not Central Park. That is an honest park. Between 40th and 42nd Streets, and between 5th and 6th Avenues, there is a hole called Bryant Park and it is the strangest place I’ve experienced in this town so far. It’s a place that changes just as fast as all the ghosts that pass over it, underneath it (it’s a hub for five subway lines), walk through the always-lush grass everyday in the summer.
Six months ago I laid in that grass with a pair of jean shorts on and sunglasses, surrounded by friends. We drank wine straight from the bottle and joined nearly three-thousand other people in cheering as Paul Newman was projected on a giant screen at the West end of the park. We all sighed together as his character, Hud, mourned the brutal murder of his herd of cows, the only family he had. We all strangely moved together.
Right now, it’s completely different. There are construction crews carting off sections of an ice rink that lived atop the hole in Manhattan all winter. Unlike after the movie, I won’t be riding a bike through the city back to my apartment. Like the ferocious building and changing of the winter wonderland due to uncontrollable weather change and the city’s ability to sell something everywhere, a doctor recently cut into my knee in three places and pulled a wayward meniscus from where it had been lodged in the joint. A limp, slightly slower than normal walking pace is the maximum speed that I can move at. These days, I am forced to walk alone.
But there are times, in this exact spot, when everything is perfectly all right. Every once in a while, usually with a stiff autumn wind at your back, you’ll find yourself walking towards a friend you’d given up on. She’s sitting at a table and she sees you from one-hundred feet away, her gaze never breaks from you, nor does her smile. She hands you a coffee as you sit down, she’s been waiting. Nothing remarkable has happened, just a normal day that she’s wanted to share with you. And that’s when you realize that you can’t keep it all straight. The constant crowds, the maze-like building interiors, the absurd address system that has you crossing the same block three times before finding your destination, the advertising bombardment. All the changes always happening faster and fasterfaster.
And that’s when she’ll ask how your day was. You’ll realize that here, now, in this park, with these ghosts moving around you, this is really okay.
