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barbecue smoke forced us
Saturday, May 11 2002In the afternoon, Gretchen and I took Sally to Prospect Park for another of our light picnics. When we got to the tip of the triangular field nearest the Vale of Cashmere fountains (the place where we had Sally's birthday party), we spot the place empty, so we immediately spread out our stuff and lay down in the grass. We hadn't even bothered to bring blankets. Periodically Sally charged into the woods after squirrels, though she just happened to be discrete whenever park rangers drove by on a roadway a couple hundred feet away. A policeman ran across Sally in the park the other day and saw she wasn't wearing his leash. He was a policeman, not a ranger, and so didn't care one way or the other about it, but he did warn her about an ongoing crackdown against the walkers of off-leash dogs. The story is that an off-leash dog bit someone in the park a couple weeks ago and the rangers now feel they must do "something" about it. Eventually the priorities of rangers will change to some other matter of urgency, but in the meantime we've had to be especially careful.
We weren't at "Sally's birthday spot" long before a group of young adults came with their barbecue equipment and cellphones and began setting up camp about thirty feet away. Gretchen was annoyed by their presence from the start, making nothing but snide remarks until I finally grew tired of it and asked her what good it was doing her to be so negative. "Good point," she agreed. Shortly thereafter the wind changed and the barbecue smoke forced us to find some other place.
After trying a few other places, we went to the open meadows between the Vale and Flatbush avenue, a pleasant-seeming spot featuring two empty concrete pools, the ruins of long-dormant fountains. These meadows are used almost exclusively by the young black Caribbean gay cruising scene and one almost never sees a heterosexual couple hanging out here, and even Gretchen was reluctant at first. But after we showed up, most of the cruisers and other assorted underworld figures nearby vanished, leaving us alone with the cantankerous catbirds. Other than excessive car noise from Flatbush Avenue, it was not a bad place to be. When the sun started going down, though, the day lost some measure of its idyllic qualities, and we returned home.There was some sort of Woody Allen marathon happening tonight on Turner Classic Movies, a channel I realized I should visit more frequently. Given this opportunity, I managed to get caught up on a number of Woody Allen movies I'd missed during my life, including Bananas, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex and were Afraid to Ask, and Sleeper.As background material for my language parsing project, I've been reading essays from a "found1" textbook called Language Awareness. Though not especially germane to my project, I've found a famous essay by George Orwell called Politics and the English Language particularly engrossing. It's essential reading for those with difficulty clearly expressing themselves in print. 1A "found" book is a book that turns up in my possession from some uncertain source, such the alley or a former housemate.
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