At the Park the other day (Dean Park in Shrewsbury, MA on an early March morning, to be clear) there was a man, probably a young one, who left only sporadically supervised by another older man whose attention was capitalized by his telephone he arrived with at roughly the same time roamed freely throughout the fenced but open gated playground space with an irregular gate, his head tacked to one side and his arms primed back in grasping mode like a raptor, clawing at the the treasures of minutia that litters the blue rubber mat flooring of the playground while muttering malaprop lines from the film Hook. I didn’t know they were lines from Hook until later when Lauren told me; I am prone to give most mutterings the benefit of the doubt and am openly attestment to the value of things I hear shouted like in the street or at a hospital or something. And so he was seemed to be legitimately entranced in the novelty of every wet pine needles or discarded yogurt lid greeting each with a fresh bit of Hook script. But his quest was rapid and his range expanded quickly beyond the distracted sight of his accompanist behind the tube slide and eventually towards the unlocked gate and the trash can beside it, which he began curiously and enthusiastically mining. Dean Park, with its central location, pond, and one point eight miles of interconnected trails thusly attracts many daily walkers and dog walkers and children and the trashcan duly represents, yielding mostly paper/plastic coffee vessels, the colorful raiments of snacks for children, and small plastic baggies of dog shit, all dripping wet with the fresh rain and general dampness from the melting snow and ice and nearby pond. The man on the telephone, who’s knitted and colorful kufi suggested he may be fasting for Ramadan, remained oblivious and engaged with telephone and a polite suggestion from Lauren as we passed through the opened gate passed the trash can and its excavator that he may not want to do that was met with no acknowledgements and more Hook lines; the bags of shit were sealed (with loose knots) and it’s not the same as like rolling around in pig shit (or working in it) and really anyway the whole thing is just so filled with assumptions, because I really don’t even know if the man who might be fasting even knows the younger Hook quoting man, or that I might be stumbling upon some sort of endless game of “don’t touch that” that the kufi’d man has relented and suspended for just a moments while he checks in with his relatives who have just broken their fast in some distant time zone, that I think a polite suggestion in the way that should be afforded anyone was sufficient, morally speaking.
I live down the street from what has only recently become a new elementary school but was once before a farm a part of the Worcester State Asylum. A cemetery for former residents remains, walled off with a round stone granite stone wall and a few gaunt lilacs and bisected by a hedgerow of illicit Burning Bush (Euonymous alatus). I am told by a certain town councilperson(who shall remain nameless) that the actual cemetery was what is now the entirety of the Shrewsbury Youth Soccer League fields and that even though there are indeed two recognized cemeteries for the formerly interned (the aforementioned and a larger one across Lake Street), the real cemetery is actually the whole of the elementary school’s abutting soccer fields whose headstones were all moved to their present locations somewhere before the complete abandonment of the Worcester State Asylum (and the whole live in state mental health hospital model) in 1991. Directly across the street from my home is owned by the State, but wasn’t when we first moved here, and is home to at least one individual who nonstop watches Puppy Clifford, visible all day long through the open window facing the street, accompanied by a rotating staff of kind, I am almost sure, West Indians.
When we first moved here I painted, from memory, Elenora in front of the house, when it was still owned by an older couple, on one of her walks (I hence painted over it, despite admiration of the young ‘Ali Ibn Sayed who, in opposition to religiously prescribed aniconstic taste, remarked on its ethereal and amorphis quality.) Elenora had lived down the street from me in a house she had lived in since she and her husband bought it in the 1950s, and she would daily walk up and down the street, collecting things like feathers and twigs, and I would sometimes walk with her coincidentally on one of my own walks and listen as she would tell me about things I’ve now forgotten about. One day she walked around with a deceased squirrel in her hands and not long after that her daughter let us know she had moved into an elderly care facility. I talk with the Persian man who bought her house for his daughter to live in while I wait at the elementary school for my daughter and he his grandson and he tells me that Elenora’s basement was filled with art books and her husband was a local professor of sorts, and he wants to talk to me about the genius of Da Vinci while I hold back demonstrating my knowledge of Rumi or Hafez or Persian rituals like yalda or the sofreh, while reminding me of the importance of fulfilling one’s domestic maintenance duties.
It’s too much to ask to give everything the same level of poetic weight as any other thing, and the answer to why certain objects are collected by people and placed in other places is usually always tied to obvious cultural habits. In my neighborhood, the most popular form of outdoor collecting is the cutting of grass and the raking of leaves. It is a bizarre ritual to those who do not practice it (my yard is a copse of rare lilacs and dogwoods and wild aster borders where areas of grass dominance is untouched except for a patch for summer games like kubb or badminton and otherwise left to the formation of large ant colonies and large calipered oak trees whose leaves’ blanket is for the emerging spring flowers) where the thing collected, the leaves and the grass clippings, are bagged and left at the street curb to be picked up and brought to a giant pile of the whole town’s leaves and grass clippings. I understand why people do it because I am not crazy and accept widely held conventions, and I see that it is driven by the urge to make what is theirs organized and tidy; an unkempt yard is, to some, a sign of dereliction and to stop the seasonal ritual of collecting and then discarding the yield of your most abundant crop is to cede habitation entirely- to live in a place is to keep it ordered, both inside and out.
When I was young we lived in New Hampshire and I spent an incredible amount of time outdoors on the frozen pond looking up at the stars learning constellations or climbing through the piles of sappy felled pine trees or lying on one of the many huge pieces of granite slowly (very slowly) emerging from the ground, warmed by summer sunlight. It was there I first realized, after learning in elementary school about moving celestial bodies and seeing the constellations dance across the sky from night to night that we are always moving and that the granite pavilion I rest upon on one day is in an entirely different place in the universe than it was the day before. There was a large mountain of fragmented granite pieces littered with the remnants of the blue fuse wire that had aided in exploding the subterranean boulders that were once where the house’s basement would be, and surrounding the house was a sea of sand where we’d create desert villages with our toys and pieces of exploded granite and like pine needles and things and sometimes trash or dead insects, until it was all turned into a grass lawn a few years after we first moved in.
I like Dean Park because it reminds me of my childhood home in New Hampshire, and after spending near a decade in Phoenix, AZ after being told by my mother and father who had visited Sedona, AZ that the stars were unmatched only to be met night after night with the hazy gloom of a backlit metropolitan sky the likes of which I’d never seen, most N.E. American landscapes do. I actually lived entirely in Tempe, AZ, where the effects of the urban night haze were still preclusive to deep celestial gazing, even atop Tempe’s “A” Mountain, where generations of collegiates have marched with buckets of paint undisruptively past ancient American Indian petroglyphs to paint “A” Mountain’s giant ‘A’ in some like ritual between the students of ASU and Stanford where they paint each other’s mountain letter the color of the other’s sports team. But the paths around the Pond at Dean Park are worn and there are baseball fields and tennis courts and children’s playgrounds and places to play volleyball and badminton and a wooden wall that could be used for American handball that says for tennis balls only, and there are lots of little pieces of things everywhere, but I rarely feel the urge to collect them or even photograph them because I often say I do not want to see the world through the eyes of a photographer. The population of Shrewsbury, MA is now like twenty-four percent South Asian, Indian in particular, and the parents of children who have moved here to Shrewsbury from desert places like Rajasthan, like my neighbor, now circumambulate the pond on the worn and littered paths and some of them stop Lauren and me on our afternoon walks to bow to the divinity they see within us.
JM Larkin
The Jazz Robot Studios 