The Sunday after 4th July I took the boys to Rainey Park. Two things meant the Summer heat was delightful instead of oppressive. There was a breeze, and we were there in the late afternoon when the Sun was low in the sky. The breeze was intensified because the park is by East River.
A couple of weeks previously we’d been here in the morning to celebrate CMH’s second birthday with friends. Now, there were parties going on everywhere, this being 4th of July weekend. Groups of folding chairs were circled around portable barbeques that released the smell of lighter fluid and burgers into the wind. The parties merged into one another because the park is only small and the children created a constant stream weaving between them, across each other, over the play area with its soft tarmac hills and slides that were too hot to slide down, unless, that is, you tipped buckets of water down which made them thrillingly fast, too fast for the little ones.
Most of the people in the park were Latino, presumably because many of Astoria’s whites headed out of town over the holiday weekend. The whole neighborhood had had a dropped-shoulders feel from Friday 4th because of the reduced population and changed demographic.
CMH headed straight for the water fountains. For an hour he ran in and out of the jets, putting his foot on them at times to block them, or observing groups of older kids with their water games, sticking out his belly to assert his toddler-confidence. JNH gravitated to the other side of the play area, a slope of unkempt grass tilting down to the river. He chased dragonflies. Huge ones swung about in the air above him. At one point he asked for a pot or a net to catch them, but when that didn’t come through he just ran beneath them, waving his arms excitedly but clearly with no real intent to catch them.
I later learned that Rainey Park is named after Dr. Thomas Rainey, who had dreamed of building a bridge from that same place across what is now Roosevelt Island (then Blackwell Island), to Manhattan. A group of Long Island City-dwellers incorporated the “New York and Queens Country Bridge Company” in 1871. Rainey became its treasurer and traveled the country to raise funds. But the War Department was worried a bridge could weaken the defense of New York and access to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and didn’t approve it. Anyway, most of the interest was for a bridge project linking Brooklyn and Manhattan. By 1892 the project was on hold. But a community group called the Committee of Forty kept the idea alive. It gained momentum after the consolidation of the three boroughs into New York City in 1898, and finally the bridge was built a few blocks South of the original location. It was called Queensboro bridge.
Dr Rainey walked across the bridge on opening day in 1909, and received a gold medal with “The Father of the Bridge” inscribed on it. He said to the New York Times:
“This is my bridge. At least it is the child of my thought, of my long years of arduous toil and sacrifice. Just over there, are the old towers of my bridge, which I began to build many years ago. I spent all I owned on the project...It is a grand bridge, much greater than the one I had in mind. It will be in service to thousands in the years to come, when Dr. Rainey and his bridge projects will long have been gathered into the archives of the past.”
In 1912, after Rainey had died, the area which he had planned for the bridge was named after him and then turned into a park.
So there we were. In a park that commemorates a man’s dream for a bridge. The air contained children’s yet-to-be-formed dreams for their future, teenagers’ emerging dreams, adults’ abandoned, lingering or realized dreams, but just contained them. All were suspended on a Summer afternoon when attention was occupied in the present, with barbeques, water-jets or dragonflies.
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Two phrases I’ve been encountering recently with implications that outstretch their mundane context:
1. The way that yoga teachers describe crossing your arms in the direction that you’re not used to:
“A non-habitual interlace.”
2. And what New York subway drivers say to their passengers, after warning them to keep a close eye on their possessions (or to report instances of sexual harassment):
“Remain alert, and have a nice day.” (They give a big emphasis to aLERT - the ER sounding the same as in "jerk").
Which of course means "keep alert – oh, and have a nice day too". But it could be understood to mean that if you remain alert, you will have a nice day.
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