A Sunday walk in the park
The Column: 07.18.25
It’s a beautiful summer where I am, hiking on Sunday with my beloved through Central Park among people walking their dogs, pushing strollers, apartment kids feeling their oats, and the separate dog playgrounds, one for lapdogs, one for hounds and mastiffs. A man selling fresh fruit under a big red umbrella. Bikes skimming along on the bike lanes, runners jogging or loping or shuffling along, and we emerge from the park at 72nd and head down Columbus Avenue to an outdoor café and find a table for two in the shade, and look at each other and the perfection of the day is utterly stunning.
The Grand Canyon is on fire and you wonder if the DOGE layoffs didn’t contribute to the extensive destruction, meanwhile the Playboy Prez visits the Guadalupe River valley and insults the grieving by comparing the flash flood to an ocean wave that surfers would hesitate to ride — the man’s inability to express genuine empathy or even imitate it is remarkable — does he not have a wife and children who can instruct him? Meanwhile, the woman I love and I sit eating salads and a baguette, at peace in the hustle and rumble of cityfolk busy enjoying their Sunday.
I admire journalists like Thomas Friedman, Susan Glasser, George F. Will, David Remnick, who focus their various lenses on the failings of officialdom and the fragility of our beloved country and set off appropriate alarms, even as they experience just such a perfect day as this, the park with its majestic oaks and maples, the watchful parents, the delight of toddlers, thousands of people pursuing happiness in the urban grid, each aware of the others, each encouraged and uplifted by the common goodness.
The country’s in the hands of a 79-year-old with serious memory issues who seems more interested in redecorating the White House than in foreign policy, who is perversely enraged by diversity and by universities as well as courtesy and insurgency, irritated by vaccines, fluoridation, windmills, civil rights, the progressive income tax, consumer protection, science and math, fact-based journalism, who intends to take us back to the McKinley administration and retreat from the larger world.
Odd to think that the Man came from this very city where, it’s safe to say, he could not be elected City Housing Inspector. Sometimes it feels as if the MAGA river is ebbing and then one of them writes in to accuse me of TDS, Too Doggone Smart, and I feel insulted that these good people have nothing better to do than read my stuff. Do they not have farm workers to expel? Hotel cleaners to lock up in the Everglades?
Perhaps we need to find a Democrat even more vulgar than the Florida Flatulence, someone not stuck in 10th grade Civics and the idea of mutual respect and compromise, but a big yahoo in a gorilla mask who’d challenge the Orange to 15 rounds in a ring, bare-handed, Madison Square Garden on national TV in bikini briefs.
The Florida Flat gained prominence by claiming Obama was born in Kenya, a brazen lie that appealed to many people, and the Democrat Flat could get some mileage out of challenging Mr. Maraschino to be tested for autism and a prevalence of feminine chromosomes.
But the national crisis fades in the perfection of this Sunday, walking hand in hand with the woman I love, heading home, back to the terrace where the mockingbird parents are feeding their two babies in the nest carefully hidden in the climbing hydrangeas on the wall, parents who stand watch, scritching at us monsters invading their space, making their irritation very clear.
I’d like to sit on the terrace and look out over the rooftops of Manhattan and watch the procession of planes descending toward LaGuardia but the mockingbird parents will not be ignored. They are seriously irked. We pay a hefty monthly maintenance fee for our apartment but the birds don’t care about that; they are about the preservation of life itself. Soon they’ll nudge Mickey and Monica out of the nest and coach them in flying and drive them away to make a life and maintain New York’s mockingbird population.
For me, the terrace is only for pleasure. To the birds, it means survival. So my love and I surrender it to them and come indoors. Life is good. Mother Nature has things pretty well figured out. Things conspire to make a perfect day. Don’t get in the way.
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I read your work multiple times. The first read is to feel it. The second is to feel it again, the third is to start to analyze your writing. By the time I’m reading for the fourth time, I’m beginning to understand how you do what you do so well. Your writing launches a drone with a video camera on it and it continues to play in my head long after I’ve stopped reading. As many have commented, you are a treasure.
I love walking with you through Manhattan. We lived there for 20 years. I miss it. I appreciate the balance you bring to a lovely walk with your beloved— the sights, the food, the joy, and mixed in is the preposterous behavior of this administration, the darkness of the campaign against education, thinking, kindness, common grace— so uncommon now. To completely ignore it isn’t real. To see it, walk with it, and still declare Life is Good is straight from God’s heart. Thank you.