September 1, 2015

From “A Park Frozen in Time” by Anonymous

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“Hello, old friend.”

I sat heavily on the park bench. It was mossier than the last time I’d seen it, with more scars and more initials carved into the back.

“It’s good to see you again…good to be with you again.”

The trees rustled softly in the light summer wind. Many of those same trees had been there thirty years ago, when as a child I’d spent many a long summer afternoon there. A few had fallen or been chopped down, but the rest…they were just as they had been at the very beginning, in my earliest memories.

“Almost like time has stood still,” I sighed. If I lost myself in the sights, I could almost pretend that I was a 5-year-old again, forever young, unwearied by the passage of time. I could almost look forward on a life yet to be lived rather than look back on one that had already mostly unwound.

A silly sort of thing, I know. But even as the years pass more quickly, their absence is felt that much more keenly. Is it the act of a foolish old man, I wondered, to sit and quietly weep on a park bench at the memories of those days that seemed to last forever?

Whether it was or not, I was glad that the park was empty. I sat there, tears streaming down my cheeks, as I watched myself run off, hand in hand with friends, into the park that had been, that was, and always would be.

If only in memory.

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December 10, 2012

From “The Forgotten Park” by Gilda Swiatek

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Brick and wrought-iron fenced, abandoned, overgrown, the park lay amid urban back ends, ringed with loading docks and gravel parking lots For Employees Only. Nobody could recall its name, being listed simply as “park” even on the earliest surveys of town from the 1820s. The brickwork and iron were probably a later addition, likely from in or near the Gilded Age, but again no contemporary records of any such improvements exist.

When the downtown area was still largely open, it was apparently a popular destination for constitutionals. Photographs from the city archives clearly show this sort of use ca. 1875, before the bricks were installed, and in 1887, afterwards. Once the downtown area began to grow, though, its location ringed by four main thoroughfares became a liability. Storefronts sprang up on the street, blocking off the line of sight between the road and the park, and it was eclipsed in both literal and figurative terms.

Now, whenever someone stumbles on the park, it’s usually late at night following a bender on one of the bars nearby. The crumbling brick and wild, gnarled trees do give the area an aura of menace, it’s true, and more than one dare has been given to spend a night under those ancient and ill-tended boughs. As far as can be ascertained, no one has followed through on it.

And, all things considered, perhaps that’s for the best. For if the true nature of that weedy enclave were ever known, surely the complacent cloud that often hung over downtown would be swiftly and brutally ripped away.

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