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Fourth of July in Prospect Park
Thursday, July 4 2002
Gretchen tells me that most New Yorkers try to escape the City on the Fourth of July, and, owing to the stuffy weather, this summer it seemed like the best thing to do. But we hadn't planned on leaving, so we had to find something to do locally. Happily, though, our friend Lin (whom we met through Ray and his posse) told us about a picnic she'd be hosting nearby in Prospect Park.
Before heading over to her picnic site, I ran down to Seventh Avenue to get some beer. Meanwhile Gretchen had baked some sort of upside-down cake. She is always happy to participate in a pot-luck so long as her contribution can be a baked good.
Lin's spot was under a large elm tree several hundred feet north of the Picnic House and just south of the widest, northernmost part of the Long Meadow. It was probably the best location in the park for setting up a picnic spot. Being at the bottom of a low valley, it was completely level, yet it featured very close horizons in three out of four directions, isolating us from both our neighbors and the continuous cop patrols. Our crime wasn't just that we had an off-leash Sally with us (or even that we were smoking pot - and were we ever!); we'd also brought a wide diversity of alcohol, and that might be illegal in the park as well (even on the second biggest drinking holiday of the year).
The best feature of our spot was the density and omnidirectionality of the shade. This was to be the first time in my life that I applied sunblock without actually needing it. Despite the incredible 98oF/36oC heat of the day, we stayed fairly comfortable in the shade. It certainly helped that relative humidity had inexplicably dropped to 40%. Still, we didn't envy the poor suckers we saw out in the unsheltered solar hostility of the Long Meadow.
Lin, her boyfriend Mark and a chick named Nalu were the only people we knew at the picnic, though a fairly good crowd of people showed up. While our picnic was similar to those around us in terms of its lack of internal racial diversity, nearly all of the others were either all-black or Puerto Rican. Aside from one guy who looked to be Filipino, ours was entirely sunburned-but-for-the-grace-of-shade. Looking over at a group of picnickers from our contingent standing around and talking, Gretchen observed, "They look like J. Crew advertisement, don't they?" They did, except everyone was maybe ten pounds too heavy and five years too old.
The "belle of the ball" (as Gretchen put it) was Sally. Everyone wanted to pet her, though her interest was mainly restricted to some squirrels who would occasionally come down from the tree on the hill to our east. I know I might be biased, but I don't believe I've ever seen a dog so well-behaved for so long in the presence of so many temptations. The woods to the south were thick with barbecue smoke: some of it ribs, some of it hot dogs, a lot of it chicken. And yet (aside from a few squirrel pursuits) she stayed with us, though we had no barbecue of any kind.
We did, however, have many tins heaping with deli food. It had been brought by one of the picnickers, a guy whose father owns an Manhattan Italian deli (as well as several thousands of square feet of downtown real estate). I would have overheard more gossip but at the time my head was too close to our picnic's ghetto blaster, which was playing some local non-Clearchannel R & B/Soul radio station. I noticed that most of the songs sung by women (including one we overheard sung by an impromptu a'cappella group at a neighboring picnic site) were about the need for a man to have money before being considered reasonable dating material. I'd been smoking pot, and the realization that women sing about such things, coupled with my lack of a J.O.B., actually made me a bit paranoid about my long-term prospects as a viable adult.
For me, pot is a great facilitators of right-brain visual modeling for concepts normally consigned to the analytical ghetto of my left brain. I found myself visualizing how groups of friends and friends-of-friends meet each other and socialize. The visualization was like the surface of a boiling caldron, the very center of which represented me, while the surface progressively further and further out represented people I knew less and less directly. Thus I can hang out with the people "directly around me in the cauldron" at a moment's notice for any reason, and they in turn can take me to hang out with the people they are extremely close to. Sometimes I can even jump over the people who introduced me to someone and I can hang out with them (and their friends) directly. Of course, the moment one start thinking of this model with the mostly-rational perspective of someone who isn't stoned, one must answer such difficult questions as "What does it take to actually be a person 'closest' to me in this boiling cauldron model?"
The one thing that was just a little odd about our picnic was that we'd brought a bunch of games to wile away the afternoon. These included Scrabble, Boggle, Ultimate Mastermind, and probably others. It's not easy playing Boggle when one has been drinking all afternoon, though drinking doesn't seem to affect the difficulty of Mastermind much at all. If anything, it speeds it up a bit, because one tends to deliberate less over one's moves.
Lin and her crew had also set up a badminton net, and I participated in a prolonged unscored "game" once the sun was low enough to throw shade upon the "court." First we had to take it back from a couple of kids who had usurped it (they gave it up cheerfully) and then we had to contend with a couple of even younger kids who insisted on playing with us despite their complete absence of skills. One little boy (who had previously run off with a racket for a couple hours) so thoroughly monopolized the shuttlecock with his inability to serve it that Lin had to introduce a second one into play just to give us something to do.
At some point in our seven-hour picnic experience we noticed a juvenile Red Tailed Hawk up in the branches of the tree above us. It was nearly adult-sized, though it was not yet old enough to hunt on its own. Someone had told us that hawks of this age are still not good at determining what is a friend, what is a foe, and what is food. This led Gretchen to warn the picknickers just to our east that they should keep an eye on their dogs, both of which were only somewhat larger than Norway Rats.
Back home in our brownstone, I discovered that water was dripping steadily from a bulge in the ceiling directly above our toilet. Since the floor plans of all the apartments in the building are the same, this meant that the toilet in the apartment overhead was having some sort of problem. Unfortunately, the person living in this apartment is none other than Jane, the crazy woman who wrote Gretchen that psychotic note back on April 4th. The nature of the emergency was such that we were forced to interact with her. She actually came down to our apartment and claimed, in the staccato anxiousness of the psychotic and/or homeschooled, that there was nothing amiss in her bathroom and that the water was probably coming from someone else's apartment. By that point the dripping had stopped and all I wanted was for this crazy woman to leave our apartment. She was so ugly (both physically and emotionally) that I couldn't even look at her directly. "Perhaps it's coming from an air conditioner," I suggested. She immediately seized on that as the most plausible theory, adding that she herself doesn't have one. After Jane had left, Gretchen seriously considered burning sage to purify the apartment. Gretchen is what might be considered a fox hole new ager.
After that crisis had passed, we found ourselves watching CSI: Crime Scene Investigations. It didn't take long before I noticed its bad writing, moralizing, and other evidence of major-broadcast-network poisoning. I'm so spoiled by HBO (where characters can smoke pot, abort their unwanted blastocysts, and have interracial gay sex without consequences) that the stilted peachiness of major network drama is distracting. Compared and contrasted, the two forms of drama seem as if they were created in two entirely different generations of American television. By the way, I don't notice the moralizing so heavily in Law and Order, though at times I find myself cringing from what's supposed to pass for witty in the writing.
Gretchen and I went up to the rooftop at around 10pm to watch what remained of the regional fireworks (those that could be seen to the west from the top of Park Slope). We saw plenty of action in Staten Island and further out all the way to the shimmering horizon along the Jersey shore, but in the foreground the only displays were brief ad hoc shows of illegal fireworks. There were a number of police helicopters equipped with spotlights swooping over Brooklyn, probably trying to bring some order to the dangerous celebratory excess.
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