Jesus the park is beautiful with this being the coldest morning of the season with the pretty smiling little gal on Willett Street unclicking the electric lock of the trunk of her yuppie car to get out the ice scraper and my feet making the first tracks on the white frosty stuff covering the blue green grass and all the leaves that had fallen in the past three or four weeks—the best colors in memory—and hadn’t been vacuumed yet even with the diligence of the cruising crews of down and outs saved by the simple work of spreading compost on the hacked out tulip beds. Always loved the park. I take the Western in and get off at now Henry Johnson Blvd then Northern, just so I can walk through to Lark and Madison which the 63 would take me to with ease and only a half block walk, but there’s this one path I always take which avoids the cars and gives me the efficiency of route that I require, around the monument, and down the walk with the new benches placed just far enough apart to avoid connection by earshot, this is after stepping around the mud in the little so far unfinished stretch from State Street to the monument which goes beside the narrow beds covered just yesterday with the incredibly black earth stuff that they were bucket loadering around—I always thought that it would be great to be one of those park guys, no problems in the early morning sunshine wheeling around that mower or working up to the point where they would trust me with the watering truck or one of those little cushmans but all the time really wanting to be just on the end of a hoe. Days long and bright with birdsong and having that feeling for the park that knowing that it’s out there and all the trees by name so that when someone mentions that there must be a map of the place you cannot quite understand and you say as the old guy at the boathouse office said when I asked him one day—a map? It’s right out THERE! and when I pressed him further he told me CEETA HOL, CEETA HOL and I was bewildered until the dawning came that he was talking about that brown building at the foot of Washington Avenue with the engineer’s office and maps of all sorts of things including every rebuilt sewer entry engineering plan in the city. So you soon hit Willett and although you don’t always think of it, the improvements and Peter R’s vision for the place and all the people involved and the underlying reason of the ceremonies that hold the city together in some ways are built around those damn Dutch and the tulips that grow in the spring and they will always be there and the money for them has no problem flowing from that brown building straight into that brown earth, the most perfect and logical money spent in town and all for the wrong, I suppose reasons but I got to work on that attitude and enjoy the blue white frost on the rolling hills and picturing Olmstead or his protege or whoever it was saying here we’re going to have these rolling hills, not exactly hills, but not flat either, frisbeeable, picknicable, even paradable in some sections, but enough amplitude, modulation to catch the morning and evening light just like that and to know that it causes the color to do that and makes that large space ten times more beautiful than just a large space and then actually getting the equipment going and all the workers and taking the pains in the face of those who didn’t see the sense of making a field into an artwork, and wishing they were doing something worthwhile like building a horsebarn instead of moving this earth for this big city madman to get that subtle rolling working just the way it should. It’s just a field, for god’s sake, but getting it rolling like that, it’s perfect especially—he couldn’t have known, on this day when it’s the coldest day of the season so far and the blue white lawn is so fabulous and cold and the colored trees are misted and greyed out in that whopping picture that shapes our visual good times from a million years ago on a day when things were just ok and life was the only pleasure we needed.