Everybody in the Park on Sunday

smartsave.com

I went walking around Central Park Sunday, 843 acres of paradise in the middle of the metropolitan grid; that always makes a person feel good because it contradicts all you read about AI, alienation, angst, atrophy of the arts, urban disaffection and antagonisms — you walk among flocks of different individuals being themselves and also enjoying flocks of dissimilars in passing, a parade of heterogenuflecting homogenuineness, joggers each jogging to their own drumbeat, dogs towing their people, papas pushing babies in strollers, little princesses, cool kids on scooters, elders freed from their four walls, everybody talking, phrases flying past — I don’t see why — I told her, Don’t — it’s nice the blue jay is pretty because it’s a mean bird and the shriek —and for me, a writer from a family of separatist evangelicals who brought me up to avoid the worldly, it is a Carnival of Humanity, it is a feast, everybody is cheerful, how could they be otherwise?

A few minutes before, I was on the phone with a friend having a dour conversation about all the usual things people my age bemoan and beweep, and now I was in a timeless scene of happiness that E.B. White would’ve enjoyed, A.J. Liebling, W.B. Yeats, J.F. Powers, J.D. Salinger, or H.D. My Grandma Dora would’ve felt at home here, her grandfather David Powell who went West in the silver rush of 1859, his wife, Martha Ann, whose father was an English seaman who jumped ship in Baltimore and avoided being hanged and took up farming in Pennsylvania.

There was such a unanimity of cheerfulness, I wished that Thoreau could be here to see it, the sourpuss who went to live in the woods because he preferred solitude. His book Walden would’ve been much improved if Ellen Sewall had married him and there’d been a double bed in the cabin and a little more gossip and less about owls and mice and skip the stuff about self-sufficiency — there’s no such thing.

I think back to when I was 20, a sophomore at the University of Minnesota, majoring in English, writing poetry, such as this glob I found recently:

The roar of ice in glasses on the still Pacific.
The poet in his rock scraped varnish from the wood worn smooth by water.
The sea would gather up its will to clean the wound of San Francisco,
Restore the madness and the lust to balance,
Soothe the troubled stones that dream of flesh and axes.

Fairly typical undergraduate poetry. Enigmatic. Nothing descriptive, no narrative, aiming only for profundity. I knew other boys writing similar things and sometimes they talked that way too. Cryptic, clipped, determinedly ambiguous.

Bob Dylan cranked out the same stuff but he had a good agent who got him a deal with a major label and the ambiguity of the songs left the listener with two choices, either this was nonsense or the guy was a genius, and nobody wants to be on the wrong side of genius, so he became iconic.

They’re selling postcards of the hanging.
They’re painting the passports brown.
The beauty parlor’s full of sailors.
The circus is in town.

It’s undergraduate poetry but it’s a hit on the charts so the guy is brilliant.

It was a gorgeous time in my life, out of a small town and into an enormous state university, thousands of people I might never get to meet otherwise, Asians and Africans come to study science and engineering, smart ambitious women venturing into fields gradually opening to them, folkies and artistes, political types, folks of the Ashkenazi tribe, frat boys — a time to stay loose and roam around and make friends and widen my world but instead I wrote incomprehensible poems and became a prisoner of my own pretensions. And majoring in English turned out to be majoring in Anguish: comedy was of no interest to them.

When I was 20, I was unlike anything ever seen and gradually I’ve become commoner and now at 83 I am more or less just like everyone else.

But here on a Sunday afternoon is the country I love. Its greatness is its civility. Tremendous progress made since I was young in its decent respect for those in distress, for all sorts of disabled especially the autistic, for those previously degraded and cast aside, the addicted, the ailing, and here we are all together on a warm Sunday in April, feeling festive, encouraged by this spontaneous community. I want to sing. O beautiful for spacious skies, for graceful woods and lawns, and if we open up our eyes, a brave tomorrow dawns.

Garrison Keillor © 04.27.26