Never stop learning about this city…
Our days of camping out on the grass being over, I thought I’d go and get us a spot in the park with a table for our tiny birthday party, and that 8am should be sufficiently early on a Saturday morning.
Not in this place…
Advance parties, all burly men, arrive as soon as the park opens, and bring supplies. They cordon off all areas that have tables for their exclusive use.
They have so much stuff that it doesn’t fit in their SUVs and they have to rent Uhaul trucks! They have tents and folding chairs and generators and boxes and boxes of food.
Then their giant families arrive.
Onto the burnt out grass we go, just need to clear away the dog poop and plastic trash from the previous picnickers. We’ll improvise a box as a table for L’s little cake. Another reminder of how every resource is increasingly scarce in this city. Anyone who has any money leaves to their or their parents’ summer cottages or beach houses, and the poor people are left in the city to fight it out with each other.
It’s fine. There are more of them, and they planned better, and even if I did get here earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to keep it – their muscles are bigger.
But why do they have to come to this beautiful place and blast their music so loudly that it fills the entire park reverberating off Olmsted’s carefully planned topography. What’s wrong with cicadas and birds? Isn’t being with nature the whole point of coming here?
tinfoilparachute 