Nash Park Dec. 15, 1985

  

I used to run passed here in my more ambitious days, stopping sometimes on a warm spring morning to catch one of the local softball games, a good place to rest until the city cut off the water fountain as part of some confused scheme to draw more people or to force folks to buy from vendors who had paid good money to not so good political people for the right to sell wares here.

Clifton is notorious for doing exactly opposite of what is best for the community, keeping its taxes low by discouraging poor people from living here, shutting off services they deem too expensive to provide.

I came here as a small child in the company of my mother to the kids pool – a blue-bottomed concrete construction as the far south comer, whose paint peals now, and who cracks have been tarred over and repainted a hundred times since then. I haven’t actually seen the pool open since I was here at 16, when Dave and I used to sit at the bottom of the hill overlooking the park’s three softball fields.

In the very early days, they had a World War II fighting sitting in a caged in area, a full-sized monster with wings and all, left for kids like me to crawl up into. In my earliest memories, it still had switched and dials, which deteriorated slowly until my last memory had it an empty hulk, a ghost in much the same way the great war was, vivid in the mid-1950s, but lost by 1966. Eventually someone carted the thing away as junk, putting a slide up in its place.

It was to this place I marched that one lonely Halloween night when I won a basketball for best costume as a bum.  I came here hundreds of times, stopping here briefly before moving on to some more adventurous place like the river across the road. One year, a great Boy Scout event occurred here and every inch of field was filled with tents.

But in 1979, when I jogged passed this place, I would stop and climb into the bleachers that lined the more or less professional baseball field in one corner of the park, pausing to watch the semi-pro teams and a one-armed, one-eyed pitcher named Lefty, who struck out batter after batter, before an otherwise bored crowd of senior citizens and giggling children.

Sometimes, I would meet one of the city’s odder characters here, who once suggested I might wear a rubber suit when I ran.

“Keeps the sweat in,” he said. “Lose a lot of weight that way.”

He had just been discharged from service for some mental disorder, but always waited here at the park to talk to me each day, and sometimes I tried to avoid him, changing my routine with the hopes he would not be here when I got here, but he always was, but eventually, he ceased meeting me, and I felt bad about it, always wondering what happened to him, eventually even forgetting what he looked like, only remembering what he said.

 

 1985 Menu


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An old nemesis December 11, 1985

Image
    Surisky hated me from early on in grammar school, although “hate” may be too strong a word to describe his reaction to me. I was simply available to him for abuse, Third grade was pivotal for both of us. Prior to that, we were simply feeling our way through Catholic School routine, emerging eventually as whole personalities from the muck of early childhood. He came across as a thug, trying to convey the image of a tough guy. He wore a leather jacket and spiked boots, and snuck into see James Dean movies. Third grade was tough on everybody, including the teachers, who considered us the worst class in the history of the school – even in the safe grades of Kindergarten, First and Second. Two of the three nuns retired after passing us on. But it was in the third grade that we began to work our magic, driving even the stout-hearted nuns crazy. Later, the nuns tried to break our spirit. But we fully represented our age and had the full impact of the 1960s behin...
Read more

The clock is ticking July 18, 1985

Image
  We’re talking love here – silly fictional love with all the connotations of disaster. I seem to be on the meat chopping block with Safire looking for qualities in me that are lacking in her husband. The fact that there is a husband in the first place greatly disturbs me. All this said, I’m uncertain as to why I haven’t ended this already, except to know she is too much like my ex-wife to pass up without a closer examination. Even the way she thinks: slow, methodical, going from point A to point B. It has only been a week since she blurted out drunk that she wanted me in bed. It seems like much longer. And she hints of something more permanent, suggesting that I might fill in for her husband for a much longer duration. The night before last she suggested I come see her in her trailer, as if she is legally separated from her husband, when in fact she is supposed to be biding time until he finds them both a place to live in Baltimore. This is the same kind of smoke and...
Read more

Pauly leaves Passaic for the final time July 24, 1985

Image
    Pauly is leaving Passaic again. This comes after two years of us rubbing shoulders after he had been cast out of paradise in Towaco, after his goddess, Jane, went and married that man Pauly calls “a bum.” This has been a tough two years, filled with Pauly’s typical manipulation, his usual shaping of reality to his own needs often at other people’s (mine) expense. When Pauly first came I had Fran’s cultist brother as a temporary guest and Pauly spent most of his time trying to push me into getting that guest out. A few months later – in November – Fran got the ax from her ex and changed her mind about moving in with me after I had committed the spare room to Pauly. He assumed she meant more to me than he did and was already packing when I told Fran no. She had no place to go except for her father’s house, a father she had a love/hate relationship with, and she held it against me, even though we continued to see each other romantically. Pauly being Pauly drove ...
Read more