Central Park Respite

Near Fifth Ave. and 60th, The Strand bookstore set up tables to offer merchandise for passers-by. While my wife and kids were in the Central Park Zoo, I had some time, a few dollars, and the inclination to occupy my mind. So, I purchased a used copy of Tana French's Edgar Award-winning novel, In The Woods.  Then, I settled onto the nearest unoccupied bench along the wall that borders Central Park up Fifth Ave. and opened the book to the prologue.

I swung my right leg up onto the bench in an act of kindness toward my knee. I'd been wearing a knee brace to help with swelling when I do much walking. I have to be delicate with the old joint, like elderly people with their brittle bones. A slight twist or shift in the wrong direction and I get a surge of pain to announce the mistake: a surge not unlike the blaring alarm that announces a botched procedure in the board game Operation. Aggravated by all the walking Manhattan imposes, my swollen knee was cursing me.

I think this knee development is part of a package of ailments associated with my aging. There are motes in my eyes that play the roles of ghostly apparitions as a matter of routine. I get light-headed more easily than I used to. And headaches are reliable as a daily discomfort. Plus, I fret over things that shouldn't merit it, and I worry over imagined unpleasant developments.

Sounds like a consuming novel was just the thing I needed to get lost in.

It was a fun read...one where you come to know the characters so well, and hold them in such regard, you are disappointed when reality sets in and you realize you won't be spending time with them once you finish reading their tale.

Cheers to Ms. French for a suspenseful ride. I think I need to hunt down here recent novel, Faithful Place.

Here are a couple of passages that drew my eye.


I remember that moment because, if I am honest, I
have them so seldom. I am not good a noticing
when I am happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or
fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been
accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting
heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that
the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into
plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than
that. I know very well that perfection is made up of
frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could
say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness:
usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that
I can see a pattern.

. . . . . . . . .

...it seemed impossible that so powerful and heady a
thing could be coincidence. I had a sense of things
stirring, rearranging themselves in some imperceptible
but crucial way, tiny unseen cogs beginning to shift.
Deep down, I think -- ironic as it may seem -- a part
of me couldn't wait to see what would happen.