Park benches seem to be good places for
epiphanies. I had one, and it was about park benches.
When I was a kid, in good weather, when
most of my friends were playing baseball, I was sitting on a bench overlooking
the Harlem River, in New York, and reading.
Probably the reason I never made it to the majors. The epiphany today was that
all these many years later I’m sitting on a bench and writing. There’s a kind of symmetry to that that I find satisfying.
At some point in its course northward,
for some reason probably now forgotten, the East River becomes the Harlem River.
Nothing about it changes but the name. At
the point where I knew it it divides Manhattan from The Bronx. It’s quite
narrow at that spot; you can throw a rock across it easily.
Give you a time marker: had you thrown
one while I was reading, you’d have hit a Hooverville on the bank on the Bronx
side. The corrugated tin and cardboard shacks were there through the Depression
years, until World War II restored the country to prosperity and the occupants
found work at Iwo Jima, Anzio, and the Ardennes. I’d seen the West Pointers of
a decade or two earlier described as “the class the stars fell on”; they were
the generals. Those guys across the river were the generation the sky fell in
on. I knew a man who went straight from riding the rods to fighting his way
across Saipan. He was only five years older than I was.
But I digress.
Bernard Baruch, who is cited variously
in other posts here, used a park bench to meet with people while advising the
government. I don’t know if he holds the record, but he advised six presidents
in office through two World Wars. Woodrow Wilson to Harry
Truman; think about that. I doubt the presidents themselves left the White
House for his bench (but then I don’t know that they didn’t, either.)
Were he alive today, Baruch would be an
Internet “Influencer” and “Thought Leader.” I don’t know that he was ever a
CEO, so he might not have been eligible
for that ultimate validation. I also don’t know if (but I like to think that) he
fed squirrels from his bench, as I like to do. In no other way would I try to
equate myself with Bernard Baruch, but squirrels are democratic. On the end of a peanut, Barney and I would be
the same to them.
