The city’s community center isn’t too far from my home. It’s an easy walking distance, and a nice place to drive by. Maybe it’s not so much of a place for the community to come together, but it’s surely a great place to people watch. That should count as a community activity, I guess?
From the outside, it looks like a green and blue crater conveniently located behind an In & Out and CVS. The lush green grass (which is greener no matter what side you’re on) rolls up and down, around the circumference of a highly chlorinated fountain that spews teal fluid in a column two stories up into the air. It seems like whoever designed that forgot about wind.
I often see people talking routine COVID-walks from the safety of my car. Despite the vastness of the park, they have an unexplainable preference for the white painted line that separates the bike lane from the street. The pedestrian is always right.
The small girl first caught my eye first. She was fearlessly invading the incumbent geese. Maybe she was craving some good old roast duck or foie gras. With pigtails and arms spread like Boo from Monsters Inc — or maybe to show off her endearing wingspan — she was ready for her attack.
It was almost comical, the way she suddenly toppled into the grass. She fell with certainty and precision, as if she had spent years rehearsing forgetting how to walk while waiting for her reincarnation. Her guardian was a medium distance away, completely unfazed. People always say that the second child is always more “freestyle” in this way.
Perhaps it’s a good lesson to start young, especially in this never-ending 2020 nightmare. Like how to fall, how to pretend that everyone has COVID (and stay away from them), how to pretend that COVID is over (while still staying away from them), how birds are evil and poop everywhere, how non-human wild friends at the park might have rabies. You’ll never know why that fountain is like that though. I’ll tell you when I figure it out.
For obvious reasons, there’s been a surge in newborns in my universe (although apparently at a macro level there’s actually been a baby bust). It’s a very in-my-face reminder of how scary and powerful motherhood is. I mean, truly the miracle of life. But isn’t it selfish to bring an innocent soul into this tarnished, conflicted, and literally polluted world? Maybe that’s just my excuse to not think about the size of the epidural needle.
In general, there’s not much I concretely remember from my childhood (except some stressful days in preschool and hating school lunch milks). But I have definitely been that kid, chasing XL sized birds at the park. I hope I didn’t fall as badly as she did, but did have my own set of letdowns when the birds wouldn’t eat the stale bread marble I tossed their way.
Learning seemed so much easier back then. How to walk, how to stand, how to not get bitten by rabid ducks. For my entire childhood, I worked very hard, staying up late to compete with an arbitrary 4.0 GPA. I hesitate to even call it that — it all blends together to be honest. Writing essays on clunky Windows 2000, cutting cards on Win7 (and burning through two laptops in the process), and quadruple tasking during lecture on my MacBook Air. Swim practice and cram school were involved somehow.
A couple years into my corporate career, I very acutely realized that I was getting dumber after graduating. So much for a lifetime of learning. Did I lose the ability to learn? Did I exhaust all my learning neurons dissecting and forgetting over $100k worth of formal education?
Or did I simply choose to forget how to fall?
Fall is a great word, I think. You can fall in the park. Fall in love. Free fall. Fall to the bottom of the bottle. Fall off the climbing wall into the cushy landing page. Fall from where you are, to where you should be. Or to where you shouldn’t.
But sometimes falling is taking the easy way out, like falling into the fresh powder in the middle of a scary black diamond or falling out of an uncomfortable conversation about when your cousin is getting married.
It’s so easy to encourage others to jump, to offer a helping hand (which they likely won’t take). It’s so easy to see only the prime time successes of someone else, without considering the struggles they had to overcome. Shouldn’t falling be just as easy?
I sincerely hope that as I change my priorities from health wealth and love to health wealth and self, that I can re-discover my own personal gravity.
