One of the childhood experiences that I never had was the quintessential running away from home story. I never had the pleasure of packing myself a sandwich and sneaking out of my apartment with the intention of never returning. Though I have no young childhood stories like this, I have since developed a habit of abruptly walking out the door when I get frustrated or angry. The first time this happened I must have been in fifth grade. I had a cell phone because I was old enough to take the train by myself to school, but I was young enough that my mother still wanted to know exactly where I was at all times. I got angry with my mom, over what I don’t remember, but I do recall storming out of the apartment and heading for the only place I knew would calm me down. In Central Park, on the northwest side of the Great Lawn is a large swing set. It was always my favorite place to stop, and I always happier after I had a good swinging session.
I was born in New York City and lived all my life in an apartment on 96th Street between Central Park West and Columbus. As I was growing up, Central Park acted as my backyard. My school was on 79th Street between Fifth and Madison, and during recess, the park served as our playground. Each grade had a specific area; the teacher led us from the posh, cold buildings of the Upper East Side into a grassy field surrounded by comforting trees, where we would mix magic potions from berries we found, play man-hunt, climb trees. I was intimately familiar with every windy path, playground, climbing tree, and secret passageway on both the east and west side from 79th Street to 96th Street.
In second grade my class’s assigned area was near a stone bridge, with a reverberating echo. In the spring through the fall, my friends and I would always see a saxophone player jamming out under the bridge and collecting what we thought was quite a bit of money. In the winter our musician friend thought it was too cold to play outside, and the grand bridge was left silent, but one day we decided to take his place. We bonded together and formed a singing group called the Fugies. In our very short recesses, we would stand under the bridge and sing the rounds we learned in music class. Come follow follow follow follow follow follow me. One day we put out an up-turned hat and managed to collect, in the twenty minutes we were outside in the dead of winter, $9.26. With our recently obtained knowledge of long division, we were able to calculate that it was a little more than $2 for each of us.
When I was still in kindergarten and elementary school, my mom used to take me to school. Every day we would take the B or C train down to the 81st Street Natural History Museum stop. We’d walk up the same stairwell, which was tiled to look like the center of the earth. Then we’d take the M79 across the park to the east side. As the bus wound around the bends of the windy road, I would stand in the middle and try to balance like a surfer without touching the bars. My mom taught violin at my school, so after the school day was over, I’d wait for her to finish her lessons. Sometimes I would sit in the same room, and at a desk at the back of the classroom, I would draw pictures with the crayons I found at the teacher’s desk. At the end of the day we’d take the bus and train back home together, just the way we came.
On certain occasions, when the weather was particularly beautiful, and we were both feeling energetic, we had the special treat of walking home through the park. We entered the park at 79th Street and walked along the path, passing the statue of the three bears marking the entrance to the Three Bears Park. We walked under the stone bridge, where the saxophone player lived, and around the Great Lawn. Sometimes my mom and I would stop at the Great Lawn, and she would lie down and rest while I practiced the latest flips I had mastered in gymnastics class. My mom and I always stopped at the swings on the northwest corner of the Great Lawn, even if it was just for a few minutes. Even before kindergarten I was great at swinging really high on the swings. I would stand up on the board and watch the older kids far below me talk among themselves, and hear them ask what the hell I thought I was doing, and say that I was going to break my neck or something. After our visit to the swings, we would move our way uptown via the running path around the Reservoir. The Reservoir used to be blocked by a giant chain-linked fence, and the water was only barely visible as shimmers behind the overgrown plant life that surrounded it, but in 2003, it was restored to an elegant fence similar to the original. Instead of being thrice my height, the new barrier only came up to my chin, and I could easily see the shimmering water because the plant growth surrounding the Reservoir was also cleaned up and trimmed. The Reservoir continues to be one of my favorite places. In the summer I take my morning run round the path. In the evening you can see the colorful sunset over the western trees from the east side, or if you’re standing on the west side, you can see the windows of the Fifth Avenue apartments blaze a bright orange. At night the Reservoir is the most peaceful scene. The branches of the trees drape over the path, and the street lamps shed pools of yellow light onto the gravely track. I like to stand at the north end of the Reservoir and look up at the tall midtown buildings and the masses of bright windows.
For about a week and a half each year (usually around late April) the entire west side of the Reservoir is blanketed in fluffy pink petals. Right to the side of the bridle path, runs a separated pathway paved not with cement, but woodchips. It only stretches the equivalent of five blocks, but the entire path winds underneath an archway of cherry blossom trees. My mother told me that the day before I was born, she remembers walking down the path when the flowers were just reaching their peak. Now the passage serves as our favorite walkway. When I was in grade school, my mom would meet me outside the heavy iron doors of my school on 79th Street between 5th and Madison, and if the weather was nice, we would across the park, around the Great Lawn and along the Reservoir, until we finally got to the “pink flower tunnel,” as I named it. This was my favorite part of our journey. I liked to try to take one petal from each tree, because one of my mom’s students had told me it was good luck. He was a fifth grader, so I believed him.
In the summer my mom and I like to go on picnics. She has a quilted blanket, which remains dormant in the winter because we only use for this purpose. A few years ago my mother found a set of pretend fancy china plates, which are actually made of aluminum, in the Met gift shop. They have deep blue rims and look surprisingly realistic, but can be dropped or even thrown against the ground without taking a scratch, perfect for picnics. We pack boxes of scones, containers filled with butter and jams of all flavors, and thermoses filled with hot tea; mine has honey, and hers remains unsweetened. My mother carries it all in a large straw basket with leather straps and stuffs in a book for each of us. There is a specific field not far from where we live that we like to go to and have gone since I was very little. The field is not very big, but it is surrounded by trees, which cast a very agreeable shade. We sit and chat over tea and homemade scones, and after all are gone, we lie down on the soft quilt and read for a few hours. When I was younger I didn’t have the patience to sit still and read, so after a few minutes, I would wander off into the trees that surround the lawn and build fairy houses and villages out of stones and woodchips that I found. The houses were certainly well constructed, but they never lasted. They all withstood gusts of wind, but a clumsy squirrel or an oblivious baby was a different matter. When I came back the next day, I would only see small piles of woodchips, or stones, but I was never too upset. Maybe some fairies had stopped by to play when no one was looking, but I didn’t worry that they had gotten crushed. They were probably pretty accustomed to clumsy squirrels.