Road notes after a seven-miler:
POPLAR lookalike leaves on street trees, 36th Street up-slope from Fifth Avenue, not many, past the entrance to the Jackie Gleason bus and train depot, and along to where the road levels, a wink at Lady Liberty before the stretch you’ve earned – all downhill to Fort Hamilton Parkway, the poplars give way to .¤.¤.
LINDENS, 90-odd of them and on this misty day (May 2) I imagine I’m back in Belgium, where running tree-lined roads in the rain yields a meditative calm, the illusion that on those grounds my distant forefathers rode on mercenary quests, or as farmers, dug in the earth, a fertile past and its personal contours .¤.¤.
NOT so in Brooklyn, the country lindens in the city only a simulacrum, as in the Green-Wood Cemetery, at one time the second-most visited public destination in New York state behind only Niagara Falls, but now .¤.¤.
AFTER the lindens, I’m running along Fort Hamilton Parkway and its entrance to Green-Wood. A woman has raised her hand in an attempt to get me to stop. Of course, her accent is foreign. French. Possibly even Belgian. Or German. The voice sounding as if she is speaking English in a French accent, with the hope that I’ll better be able to understand her.
SHE makes me to understand that at noon on a Wednesday she would like to visit beautiful Green-Wood. But there are no guards at this wide, ornate entrance, which is shut tight as a drum.
“Do you know where is the main entrance?” she says.
“Do you have a car?” I say.
She shakes her head no and then I begin to tell her how to get there. But such particular information in English draws a blank look.
“It’s about two kilometers,” I say, holding up two fingers.
She frowns and then stares beyond the black wrought-iron gates. I’m on the clock, or otherwise I’d do more to help her. Even give her a boost up and over the arrow-tipped fence. She’d come all the way from Bruges, I think, and she can’t get into the cemetery for a visit on this misty afternoon.
I shake my head and say sorry. “Thank you,” she says ardently. When I’m off a bit I turn around and she’s gripped the railing, is peering inside.
WE saw Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” recently in Russian (with English translation). How the woman at the Green-Wood Gate reminded me of Chekhov's sisters, how what they wanted was close, close enough that it never was not imprinted on their mind, on their body, on their spirit, yes, on their soul. (When you go to watch Chekhov in Russian, you can’t help but check your smile at the door, feel the brooding coming on, what can lie in the human heart but steppes and taiga of disappointment, if not despair.)
THE three sisters will never stop with the idea of going back, to Moscow, what was once the Moscow that by the end of the play is no more. Just as this woman yearns for something that’s past. I’d like to think that such longing could be true of Green-Wood too. That Green-Wood can evoke the Chekhovian, and not be yet another place in America devoted to the non-humanistic, the non-social, the non-democratic .¤.¤.
I RECALL the cheering at the Republican candidate debates for the idea that the medically uninsured should be left to die rather than to accept the principle of a truly public, taxpayer-supported hospital, and a shiver flies up my spine as I turn left off Fort Hamilton Parkway and climb the hillside border of historic Green-Wood Cemetery.
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