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


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