After a swim at the Rec Center, about 8:10 or so; Red Hook Park, as a softball game was getting started. The color of the sky and the crispness in the air and the slight wind took me back, weirdly, to my early boyhood in Fort Lee, and the songs I used to hear coming from my uncle's VW Bug when we'd drive past some park in town on just such a night; The Kinks' "Tired of Waiting For You," that's one I recall quite distinctly. 1965, then. And I am SO much older than that now, but at moments I can believe that I don't really feel all that much older at all, or that I understand anything better than a particular feeling of being glad to be alive. Odd, strangely magical, I guess I can call it; a moment when the environment compels/allows you to recede into some never-really-changing state of solitary blessedness, in which you feel a part of everything but simultaneously utterly removed from everything as well.
Thanks for your what-the-hell decision to post this. I have a sharply etched equivalent: 1958, a newly-created Little League field shimmering in S. Georgia’s July heat, and the PA system of an adjacent public pool blasting “Do You Wanna Dance?” as background to my baseball apprenticeship as an 8 year-old.
Literary Interlude from Netherland, which is excellent by the way:
We drove in rain to Red Hook, a rotten waterfront district of trucks, potholes, faded road markings, reckless pedestrians.
I’m not sure if it’s sad or funny or both or what, that when I remember my own crisp fall evenings spent waiting in the car for my brother to finish soccer practice, the song I most immediately think of is Deadeye Dick’s “New-Age Girl.”
Lovely moment/photo; as soon as I saw it, the picture reminded me of a similar moment from my own younger days, a long, quiet, suburban road near my parents’ house in Dublin where I liked to run at dusk, and where, just for a couple of minutes, I felt like the only person in the world, with a ghostly foghorn echoing from the harbour a few miles away. It was a complete illusion: on the other side of the wall along the road was a crowded housing estate but for some reason you couldn’t hear a sound from inside.