Civic Center Blues
a series about a park
James Meadow in Part I: She is half-naked and friendly. Probably clean, too, since she is merrily soaking in the Seal Pond - where, by the way, there are no real seals. Just two statues that spit water at each other and are lucky they are made of bronze because that means they don't have to worry about accidentally catching a glimpse of the woman who, FYI, is naked from the waist down and sharing the pool with them even as she sings out to a passing unlucky non-statue, "Hi! What's your name?"
You don't often get the chance to be scarred or amused - take your pick - by this kind of nether-view in The Park. But if you hang around long enough, chances are you'll see something odd or scary or scuzzy. Something that will make you want to not hang around.
It might be the guy rummaging through a garbage can, tossing stuff out - think of it as a different form of trash recycling - as he looks for whatever it is he's looking for. It might be the homemade obscene ads offering cheap oral sex posted with indelible pink marker on a stone railing. It might be the portable toilets where beer cans have been tossed in the urinal. It might be a hard look from one of the people who use-buy-or-sell drugs. It might be the dead pigeon that lies stiff in the grass, flies buzzing around it, and, a day later, all that's left is a single feather.
