Harry finally made it to Washington Square Park. Well, not finally. To Harry, a veteran New Yorker of 2 days, there was no “finally” in New York. It was an immortal landscape of activity. One thing after the other – you looked in any direction and there was something worth seeing. When you got to it, you looked again and there was another something, and another, and another, until you found yourself eventually in Washington Square Park. Or anywhere else. Anywhere else in the city was just as beautiful, as monumental, as full of life as anything you ever saw.
Two cops walked toward him at the entrance and he went to the other side of the paved walkway to accommodate them. They didn’t look at him at all. One pushed a carriage right by him – the kind you see homeless pushing, usually overflowing with trash and clothing. This one was filled with equipment he didn’t recognize. He heard garbling and looked to his right to see a flock of pigeons. Above them, an older man tossed seed from a small box. He shook his hand whenever a pigeon flew up to try and get it from the source. Harry smiled. To the left, a group of women in spandex wrung themselves into pretzels. He took a photo and sent it to his girlfriend. “Yoga in Washington Square Park if you like it.” He put it back in his back pocket. He walked to the nearest bench and sat down.
A man sang a song in Spanish and played guitar on the bench next to him. He couldn’t make out the words. He looked ahead and prepared himself, noticing that the fountain was off. The fountain was off but still people surrounded it. They took photos in front of it. One man continuously biked around it on a city bike. He wore a big draping shirt like the kind you’d see on some monks maybe, and the pants were white linen, and together they flapped flaglike in the 10 o’clock sun as he churned the wheels forward.
Harry tried to focus. He stared at the ground and started counting his breaths. One, and 2 – 3. He focused on the belly. “Centro de la tierra” he heard the man next to him hum, and he thought Senora Potter would be proud to hear him translate those words in his head: “The Center of the land? The Center of the Earth.” It occurred to him the man could only be singing about New York. He went back to his breathing. 1, 2, 10, 100.
“Excuse me,” a man said leaning over him. Harry looked up.
“Could you help me out for the music?”
“Huh?” Harry asked. “What music?”
The man looked angry. “I just sang to the whole park!”
Harry looked to the right of him and saw the man still strumming his guitar, singing in Spanish. “I didn’t hear your singing at all.” The man huffed and marched to the next bench.
Harry surveyed the park again and saw the fountain had been turned on. He figured the fountain must be turned on at 10 every day and now it was blasting in all its glory. Around the edges of the bowl shot maybe 8 small streams of water toward the middle, where a single thick column spit toward the empty sky. Harry, who had been sitting straight up to allow his belly to expand fully, now let his spine relax. His shoulders fell. He reclined and shut his eyes. He felt the warmth of the sun on his face, his cheeks and temples, and the breeze told him to take his hair down. He removed the hair tie and his hair fell to his chest and shoulderblades. Somehow, this place was magic.
Here he was, 35 years old, no job, moving into an apartment he could only afford with money he was saving for retirement, and Harry was as worriless as he’d been as a kid. A big smile they always said, the lunch ladies told him all the time. “You always have such a BIG SMILE on your face.” Harry always shrugged, as though it was strange for anyone to move through life without a big smile. He was still that way – only now there were lines to prove it.
There in the sun, he didn’t care much about his age, his past, his rent – about much more than breathing in Manhattan air. He was a dwarf. A mite. A beautiful mite. A molecule of the city at last. It couldn’t be Rome. It couldn’t be Paris. It was 3,000 miles from Los Angeles, 8 stops from where they stayed along the way – from Visalia and Vegas, Salt Lake City to Denver, Omaha, Chicago and more. It was 8 stops away and if you had somehow Pangea’d all 8 together, you still couldn’t come up with something so sublime, so unique and so brimming with humanity in its every form.
He thought of Frank O’Hara, lying there so lifeless when he too was once a part of this theater, a chronicler of it, and that written on his headstone is “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” How much he would’ve enjoyed the Spanish guitarist, and the fountain gurgling and the man circling it in his flowing outfit, the tourists surrounding it, climbing into it even to get a good photo, dogs lounging on the concrete benches in the shade, pigeons pecking at the feet of resting pedestrians, a shirtless man on the other side doing tai chi, and all the people walking – all the people walking in their dresses and shorts and slacks and heels and sneakers, in all black, in all white, in patterns so bright you had to shield your eyes – everyone in their own rhythm but all walking with an energy and height that a tourist might mistake for pride, but as a New Yorker – as a veteran New Yorker of 2 bright and bold and long days – Harry knew that energy was youth. Here the young were young and the old were young too. Age doesn’t come to Manhattan. Age stays in the suburbs. So it was no surprise that the walks here were like dances, with knees that spring and arms that swing and spines that stand as erect as the skyline itself.
Maybe this was the worst place for meditation. Or maybe it was the best place to “be in the moment.” Whatever moment he chose to be in, it was a moment in Manhattan, in a city he’d only really discovered at the age of 30, but one he hadn’t stopped dreaming about since. He closed his eyes and began to breathe again.
1, 2, 10, 50, 100, watch the belly. His eyes rested on the water. The Spanish guitarist was practicing the same line over and over, “Centro de la tierra,” and Harry was about to turn to the man to tell him he liked his music when suddenly there was a cold sting in the right side of his neck. It didn’t register as pain at first, but when the second and third came, there was no doubt. The Spanish guitarist screamed just like we do in English, and Harry slumped and then fell to his knees, right where a pigeon was searching for scraps of food below him. He clutched his neck and coughed up blood. A few at a time and then all at once, the park erupted in wails and everyone fled, bodies spewed through the Washington Arch, knees bouncing and arms swinging, the police that didn’t notice him earlier noticed him now and they rushed toward him with weapons drawn. Later, after they subdued the assailant, it was reported that in his police interview he claimed he was Pontius Plilate reincarnated. Harry, with his new beard and long hair since the COVID pandemic, had been told by many people that he resembled Jesus. Most of the time he chuckled and pretended to bless the person who said it. Once he even thought of dressing as Jesus for Halloween. As the cracks in the cobblestone filled with blood, Harry’s elbow began to give and the pigeon returned to search the surrounding ground.