April 7

Sitting on a park bench on a late April morning: Battle of the Senses

This is something I rarely do, sit in the park and write. It’s such a rare day however, that I’ve made an exception. It’s what we would call in New York a Top 10 day – cloudless soft blue sky, bright sun, almost imperceptible cooling breeze and birdsong, lots of it from every corner of the auditory frame. It’s one of the those days you’d like to bottle, suck up a bit of it and store it under your bed for that certain to come morning when the sound of rain is the first thing you hear and you search hopelessly in the darkness for the blanket that slipped off the bed last night during a dream of walking nude through an ice-cold pond. You feel that cold place on your neck, cold stiff when you finally rise and rub it warm, certain that beneath it the tissues have already set in building some virus that will sack you for a few days. That’s what I was told anyway, that cold air blowing on your skin while sleeping slows down the flow of blood just enough to let the nasties in. I still sleep with the window open, nasties notwithstanding. I’d rather die from a cool breeze than smother in the husky dampness of an over-warm room.

I’ve found a patch of sun here. I waited while the white-haired woman in yoga garb ate her dark bread and tofu sandwich then left this bench to me. The park I’m sitting in right now is filled with old trees, just leafed out in the last week or so, so the shadows they cast are wide. If I were to stay here through the day, I’d have to slide over to the adjoining bench at about 2PM to catch the late-afternoon angle. Right now, I’m on the late morning bench, facing the apartment building I’ve lived in for the last two years here in the heart of Cologne. Days like this are rare in Cologne – that’s another reason I decided to come outside and enjoy it. For most of the year, the sky is gray and our sun hardly ever puts on a display like the one we’re enjoying today. I lived in LA for a time and almost began to take it for granted, that constant sunshine in the daytime followed by the cool, crisp nights. Here we don’t have that luxury and I expect that all over town the parks are full and filling still, on throughout the day and into the evening (if the weather holds) with pale Germans craning their faces toward the light. In an hour or less, the school children will be coming home and the park will begin to fill with them. I don’t have much more time to myself. Already a young lady has taken her position on the bench next to mine, rolled up the legs of her jeans and with a large blue mug of something, sits quietly staring at the tulips in the flower bed behind her. I was a little concerned when she first sat down. She had her cell phone to her ear and I imagined having to listen to the interminable one side of a conversation, always spoken in a voice loud enough to carry half-way down the block. But (thank you great spirit) the other party didn’t answer and so we sit not six feet apart in relative silence. The only noise being the click of my fingers on the keyboard of my laptop and the gentle bumping roll of car tires on the cobble-stone street just beyond the tulip border.

Oh crap – she finally found someone to talk to on the telephone. Is she that bored with this beautiful day that she has to pick up that stupid thing and stab the perfect sound space with her idle chatter? Her face (she is now sprawled out on the bench) is very close to me, I could just about lean over and grab the phone from her hand, and I understand enough German to know that this conversation is about nothing – just blah, blah, blah what are you doing?, nothing, me too blah, blah blah … This is why I don’t come out more often into the park to write, because it doesn’t really work , the park is as much hers as mine, I can’t really complain about it (even though I do) she’s got just as much right as I do to be here.

She’s heating up – I can smell her perfume as it comes to a simmer on her face, now fully flattened out to the sun. Too bad it isn’t better smelling, that would be some consolation, instead it’s just something soap-like with a hint of antiseptic, a dash of artificial floral whatsit finished off with a splash of drug-store deodorant. The latter may not be an element of her perfume but it has become a fragrant note of her total body scent which wafts my way … I’ve lit up a cigarette, there she goes, she’s sitting up now, my smell is far nastier than hers, maybe enough to get her to move altogether. Isn’t that terrible of me? Lighting my nasty punk of a fag in the service of a bit of silence? But it worked, there she goes, I’ve got the place all to myself again, for another ten minutes or so until the next sun worshiper drops by. Ah, the joys of a sunny day in the city.

Rites of Spring

It’s that time again, when the air is warm enough to walk outside in your shirtsleeves. At this time of year, the park below my window is more often than not filled with city folk anxious to spend an hour or an afternoon, anywhere but inside their apartments. The winter is long and dark in this part of the world and Spring is much anticipated. This weekend many of the neighbors have shuttled off to the mountains for a final fling on the slopes, while others are at the shore hoping against hope for a warm day by the water.
Me, I don’t have anywhere I want to go other than into the garden, to putz around in the dirt, in the mini-world of withering daffodils and regal tulip stems and greening rose bushes. Nearly every morning I fill the wheelbarrow with garden tools and watering cans and roll over to the two flower beds I have husbanded through the winter to see what has sprung up or blossomed overnight. Gardeners will know what I’m talking about – the rest of you will think I’m a bit daft – but the world of the garden is a world of its own. The trick is to tighten your focus, think small, and get down into the dirt for a spell.
A garden is filled with life and none of it talks back to you or gives you attitude about not being able to conjugate the German version of the verb “to be” in all its various and completely mind-numbing variety. The inhabitants of the garden are grateful for your attention, happy to see you each morning when you feed and clean and water them, when you pick the broken shards of last-night’s beer bottles from between their leaves, or remove the soggy, half-filled containers of take-out Chinese food from under their stems, or rake away the piles of cigarette butts that singed and burned them through the course of the night as the local revelers sat or stood or collapsed drunk upon their leaves and blossoms.
Being a gardener in the city presents special challenges. It’s one thing to have a garden on your balcony or in your back yard – it’s another thing entirely to tend to your little green universe when it sits smack dab in the middle of the city, in a public park, in the most favorite late-night drinking spot in town.
I’ve been looking forward to Spring. I don’t know how many more dull, gray days with occasional afternoon or evening showers I could have taken. At the same time, the gardener in me was anxious. With the sunny days and warm nights comes the inevitable migration of the barbarians. Like many of us, they have spent the winter hold up in front of their TV sets, lusting after Germany’s Next Top Model, and counting the days until they can once again do their drinking out in the streets where it belongs.
For the city gardener these first warm days mark the start of the body count that will continue through the Spring and into Summer and late Fall when once again folks will retreat back into their homes to fatten up for the coming year. Every morning when I roll that wheel barrow home, it is filled with the casualties of the previous night’s entertainments. A handful of tulips that will never see the light of day, branches and stems and seedlings that barely had a chance to green before they were trampled or bathed in stale beer or Jagermeister.
There’s no rhyme or rationale to it – some perish and some survive. Even the flowers stuck deep in the garden away from the perimeter, the ring of death, where the revelers plop down each night, aren’t necessarily safe. A wine bottle tossed back into the green can be a deadly missile, tearing off body parts or crushing the very young.
But there are also survivors, like this one small, wild rose, which for some reason has withstood season after season of the onslaught more or less intact. It is a straggly thing, with branches shooting here and there, it’s a mess really, but I am reluctant to prune it or do anything really other than give it a drink now and then. I don’t want to mess with its Mojo.
The sun is up and another Spring day is about to begin. It’s also the weekend so I’ll have a little more time than usual to tend to the plants. I don’t know what I’ll find when I go out there this morning, how many casualties from the previous night I’ll find. But chances are most of the garden will have survived to see another day. It’s Springtime after all and the flowers are happy for the extra hour or two of sunshine in which to bathe and grow and live another day.

March

It is time for the planting of things

It is time to sit for an afternoon

and think about the days

so soon here and gone

of summer

of anticipating

of building

of making

I need an afternoon to think

about what must be done

and what to sow

already birds are calling me awake screeching

they are piping hot

they are shrill screaming

‘wake up mister…come outside and see

the sun shine longer

and tomorrow longer still’

I hear you

I hear you

I am inside thinking about the garden

about next steps and places

bones already walked so far

and just now starting over

it is nearly March

another April, May

Take a breath, just one

and summer powers in

summer in an afternoon

fading gold to blue-gray

light for the night till ten

then a garden filled and flowing

and thanking God for the blessing

to quiet winter

after so brief a summer passing.