They’ve redone the paving stones along the walk from the southeastern entrance to Central Park, today (April 9) finally a day that makes me think of summer, which if you were to ask me if that were possible last time I was here, Saturday, January 22, no one out the frigid morning of the Central Park Half-Marathon except us, rogue runners, the hardcore, in the many hundreds, I’d have to say it was unthinkable, and now as I sit here, finally not feeling sorry for myself, embittered by what seemed so certain to me once, the culpability of the physical therapist who worked on my hamstring muscles only twenty minutes before The Event, two weeks ago tomorrow, a grudge that’s vanished, as foreign in feeling to me as if it happened to someone else, this me on a different path altogether, not a runner’s one alas, instead, memory lane, the sun’s warmth, winter like a icy remote island, its ferocity past, truly past, a young man dressed all in brown, Kiplingesque braids, sweeping away the bits of trash, the evidence of now, so that as M and I go back in time, from the Strand book kiosk entrance at East 57th Street, behind us The Plaza, the scent of horses, birds chirping, the murmur of balloon-shaping clowns, a puppeteer, an Arab man sizing us up as tourists, declaring, “You are here!”, pointing to an illustrated map that opens before us like an accordion, and M, the more instinctive New Yorker, counters, “We live here,” and the man harrumphs as if to say, “Well, make it more obvious, would you, you’re wasting my time,” refolds the map as I feel only a twinge in my leg under the miracle Tiger Balm patch, a mental-reminder to buy stock in its maker, and try in the thickening crowds to keep an even keel so that we don’t talk about The Injury, engage instead the Beginner’s Mind, when each moment is lived as if it's the first and that is what we think, M and I, we think, “Where did all the time go?” We both feel and probably always will feel like young parents when we’re on these trash-swept-clean paving stones, “Where is she, Kate? Did she run off ahead of us.” Those years we would always come here, even the years after we moved to Brooklyn, M, L & K in Central Park, the animal musical band of the Delacorte Clock; here at 3:30 p.m., Saturday, April 9, a half-month of Saturdays since the day of the freezing race, and off they march with their instruments, the Penguin drummer, the Bruin cymbalist, my faves, also the Hippo playing the violin, best seen in profile as it rounds the carousel and M sings the final note of a number that is being chimed, something from “Oklahoma!” that in the sun’s warmth comes flooding back to her from the first movie she’d ever seen on the silver screen.
