Journal Entry: Central Park Sundays

In most American families in the 1960s, Sunday was a time for outings, family dinners and rest. Not so in apartment 3B. Sundays were when my mother went AWOL. I would wake up to find her already gone and would shuffle into the kitchen to make my usual breakfast, Cocoa Krispies with Hawaiian Punch instead of milk. My dad was fully dressed in a rumpled white shirt and suit pants, dozing on the living room couch. He had long been banished from my mother’s bedroom. Most nights, I drifted off to sleep to the sound of his manual typewriter but it never occurred to me that he did not have a bed of his own. I brought him a Twinkie and a can of Fresca, the breakfast of champions.

My younger brother burst into the living room chasing the cat with a rubber pellet gun. “I wanna go my favorite rock.” he stammered. At six, Griff’s speech impediment was such that he needed his sister to interpret for him. This caused him to have a peculiar mixture of dependence, resentment and hostility towards his verbally expressive sister. He ran back into the bedroom and came back with the net and buckets, swinging the buckets wildly in his hand, narrowly missing my ribcage.

My father sighed with a boys will be boys resignation while I informed Griff that he could not go outside in his train pajamas. I took his arm and half escorted, half dragged him back into his bedroom searching for suitable clothing. Laundry had been taken in on Saturday but no one bothered to pick it up so the pickings were slim. I managed to find a pair of pants; socks and a shirt shoved in a corner and tossed them at him. There was literally no clean underwear for either of us and most likely wouldn’t be until Monday night.

My dad threw on this suit jacket and we were off. The greatest thing about living on West 79th St was the accessibility to Central Park and the lake. This was a place where our usually stogy, professorial father became Huckleberry Finn. The lake was a little murky, not nearly as bad as it was a decade later when Woody Allen in Annie Hall dipped his hand romantically in the water dredging up a handful of slime, and it was still filled with wildlife. Turtles, frogs and fish could be seen with the naked eye. Even as a child, I questioned the people fishing off the rock. I couldn’t imagine eating any fish that came out of these waters. It was tadpoles we were after. They were easy to catch and transport home. My father was not a graceful man and never had appropriate footwear for climbing rocks so there was always the added amusement of his slips, falls and near misses. He always walked home with water squishing out of his shoes. My brother on the other hand, had an uncanny knack for scooping up tadpoles, which I would then transfer to the buckets and watch intently. Our roles were clearly defined. The boys hunted and gathered and I protected, nurtured and found the best rocks. With 2 buckets filled with pungent lake water and a few dozen tadpoles, we carefully made our way back home, sun kissed and triumphant.

We had an empty tank in my bedroom. As a family, we went through a plethora of gerbils, hermit crabs and chameleons, but this tank was reserved for our tadpoles. I designed the interior like Martha Stewart with a touch of Andy Warhol. I filled the tank with rainbow gravel, painted rocks and psychedelic stickers. We had a surplus of fish food and mealworms from pets gone by, and our tadpoles thrived and transformed in their new environment. Our only issue was that we were not too diligent with the mesh top that covered the tank, and we tended to get distracted by the drama in our daily lives.
I awoke one morning to the sound of my mother cursing a blue streak and slamming pots and pans. My room was the maid’s quarters off the kitchen.

“God damn it! God damn it to hell! Fucking shitfaced bastards!”

I climbed down from my loft bed to assess the situation. My mother’s language was not unusual. She was standing at the sink throwing pots, silverware and towels around the kitchen. Black shadows danced on the tiled floor and across the kitchen table.

Something black was smashed into the butter. I was unable to process what was going on.

“Fucking filthy swamp bastards, I fucking hate all of you!” I turned around and saw my room had the same black splotches moving through the comic books and clothes on the floor. I glanced up. The mesh cover of the fish tank was off, most of the water had evaporated from the steam heat and there wasn’t a tadpole to be found anywhere. I grabbed a pot and tried scooping them up in my hands, but they were so slippery.

My mother started stomping on them like a deranged flamenco dancer. My brother found this hysterically funny, but he was more adept at catching them. I think all in all we were able to save five which my mother insisted we release back into the wilds of the Central Park lake.

A few days later, a peculiar fishy smell permeated my room. I washed out the fish tank but the smell remained. It was my brother who discovered them. Three or four of the frogs had fallen behind the radiator. The heat came on and they were literally cooking. A redneck barbeque of the worst kind. Griff extracted the charred dead bodies of our former pets with a broom handle and needle nose pliers, occasionally waving a blackened frog leg in my direction for the sheer pleasure of hearing me scream. Our Sunday visits to our favorite rock continued with our father for years, and we continued to catch the critters and fill our buckets, but we never again brought any home. I like to think the descendants of the few we saved still inhabit the murky waters of the Central Park Lake.