That Isn't Part of This Story

Once when I was five my kindergarten class went to Riverside Park. My kindergarten was called Red Paint and it had a red door and was a few short blocks from my mom’s apartment, which used to be my dad’s apartment, too - until I turned four and he left. He didn’t leave because I turned four - that’s just a happenstance. This is the school where I dreaded circle time, but loved the giant climbing structure in the middle of the main room, and found nap time comforting even though I never slept. This was the year I got lost six different times on different little trips around the neighborhood, and as a grownup I do not understand how my mom kept sending me to a school that kept losing me, but for the purposes of our story, it doesn’t matter. It was the seventies, just go with it. 

One of those times I left Riverside Park on purpose because my friend Matty and I were bored and we thought, what’s the worst that could happen? We knew it was wrong, but we lived in the same building and were only blocks away, and why not do something a little bad? And we snuck away from the grassy knoll and trees where we’d been playing - a beautiful green oasis that faced the Hudson River, and across from it New Jersey where my aunt and uncle and cousins lived - through the tunnel that leads to a curved set of wide stone steps I can see right now in my mind. I was there about a month ago when I went to New York to bury my mother’s ashes, but that isn’t part of this story, or maybe it is. We raced up those steps holding hands, we passed the walkway where - if we’d headed left and walked seven blocks - we would have found the 91st Street Garden where my stepdad now volunteers on the weekends, and which was featured at the end of You’ve Got Mail. But that isn’t the way we went, and that isn’t part of this story, either. 

91st Street Garden, stepdad, me.

We went past the 83rd Street playground where we’d built hundreds of sandcastles and see-sawed countless hours, run through the sprinklers on 90-degree days and licked sticky, melted popsicle juice from our chubby fingers, where I used to be scared of the highest slide until Matty went down with me a million times - wrapping his arms around me from behind tightly so I knew I wouldn’t die, and up the hill to Riverside Drive. Then we hung a left as my dad would say, and a right on 85th Street, and got to our building. That’s as far as our plan went, and when Larry from across the street saw us, he called my mom. The rest of that story is for another day.

(Hi, Larry. Larry reads my stuff, which feels like some kind of New York City impossible fairy dust sprinkled on the timeline of my life.)

On the day that I want to tell you about, we went to Riverside Park and climbed up Caterpillar Rock to have our lunches. On this day I did not dilly dally, so I did not end up crying on a corner wondering how my entire class had disappeared without me noticing. How twenty-five five-year-olds and two teachers can walk far enough ahead of you that you don’t even notice because you’re stuck in your head thinking about a million different things is beyond me, but it happened. But not that day.

That day I got to the rock where we would always find fuzzy, chubby, black-and-yellow striped caterpillars in spring, where we’d pick them up gently and giggle uproariously because it tickled when they inched along on your arm, and I sat down with my class, and opened my brown paper bag to eat lunch. Because I was coming from my mom’s house that morning, I can safely guess I had Oscar Mayer bologna on Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip, a mealy red (not) delicious apple, and maybe a Twinkie or a Hostess Chocolate Cupcake. Some kind of juice box, or chocolate milk. 

This is Gregory, not Matty. Gregory isn’t part of this story.

My mom didn’t learn about health food until she became friends with a woman named Cherie in 1979 or 1980. Cherie was obsessed with health food and my mother, and not in that order. But anyway, that isn’t part of the story, either. On the day with the lunches on Caterpillar Rock (which isn’t a real name, by the way - if you look up “Caterpillar Rock, Riverside Park” nothing will come up - it’s just the name we gave it as kids) I’d finished my lunch and put what remained in my brown paper bag, making sure I’d put my napkin and empty sandwich bag inside, along with any other litter. 

These were the days when Iron Eyes Cody - an Italian actor who was known for playing Native American characters in Hollywood Westerns because it hadn’t occurred to anyone that maybe hiring actual Native Americans to play Native Americans was a better thing to do - played the “Crying Indian”, a man in full face makeup and headdress, sitting on a horse, crying because of all the litter people would leave on the side of the road. His eyes welled up, he had one tear sliding down his face, and he looked directly at you. He was the most brokenhearted, hollowed out person imaginable, because people couldn’t be bothered to pick up their shitty trash. And when he wasn’t getting his point across, Smokey the Bear was seeing to it that you’d never start a forest fire by lighting a match, or god forbid smoking a cigarette. The upside along with this message - he was not an offense to all bears. Fred Rogers would teach you how to be a good person in the afternoons, how to deal with your fear, hurt feelings, confusing thoughts, and this sometimes scary world. At 10pm every night, a PSA would come on reminding your parents they had children. 

Anyway, I’m sitting there, talking to my friends, and suddenly, a squirrel is in my lap. I could feel its back paws digging into my thigh, its body vibrating at some frequency that seemed right for a creature who could appear out of nowhere, its nose in the air twitching one way and another, whiskers so close to my face I could move them just by breathing, front paws rubbing together continuously, like it was plotting, or thinking about plotting some kind of coup, bushy tail hovering. I froze. All my friends froze. One of my teachers very seriously told me not. to. move. She said it in a way that told me I’d better not move at all. After three seconds or hours or years, the squirrel jumped off of me and raced through the feet of twenty-five five-year-olds who were now screaming and jumping and ecstatic because of the crazy thing that had happened. 

I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t understand what had happened or why it had happened, I just knew it wasn’t the kind of thing that happened often, and it made me feel special at a time when I really needed to feel special. The year between four and five had been a hard one. My mother’s mother - my beloved Nanny - had died, my parents split up, my dad lived in a new apartment with a new lady friend and still spent time with lots of other lady friends, my mom was exhausted a lot and dating a lot, and I guess I knew on some tiny level that everything you thought was solid could change in a week. A squirrel landing on my lap felt like something. Like it had picked me. 

About a month ago I came home from being somewhere, god knows where, and pulled into my driveway. Sometimes I sit in my driveway, in my car, after I’ve turned my car off of course - because Iron Eyes Cody might be dead, but I still know you don’t let your car idle for no reason - and I read. Not like a novel, I mean I’ll check my emails, or read the news, something quick. It’s this weird portal, this in-between space where no one needs me, sitting in my driveway in the car. So I’m sitting there, and I opened the drivers’ side door because it was hot. And I was aware of a squirrel chittering nearby, but I didn’t look up because I was answering emails.

I was probably answering emails for a good three to four minutes, and as I was about to make the transition, grab my stuff and head into my house, I looked up and realized this fucking squirrel was sitting on the chest-high wall that encloses my driveway, staring at me, chittering. It was about three feet from my face, and I understood that’s where it had been for three to four minutes, staring at me while I ignored it. And I have to say, it seemed pissed. Pissed like it wanted to take a flying leap onto my face. Pissed enough that I was horrified, pulled my left leg back inside the door, and slammed it. I’m not proud, okay? I’m just telling you what happened. “I’m sorry!” I said through the window, “But also, please get the fuck away from me!”

Like this, but closer and more pissed off. Photo by Anthony Intraversato on Unsplash

 A million things have happened between the squirrel on Caterpillar Rock and the squirrel who wanted to eat my face. I lost touch with Matty when his parents split up and he and his mom moved out of the building. I ran into him on Broadway, years later when I was in my twenties. We exchanged numbers. We talked a few times and then it became clear Matty thought the promises we made when we were five - that we’d grow up and marry each other - were promises he expected me to keep. Something had broken in Matty. That happens to people sometimes because the world is harsh and it turns out your dad can beat the shit out of you one too many times, through no fault of your own.

Some of the things that have happened have been amazing and some have been painful in ways that are hard to put in words. There’s been the kind of love that you can’t even contain, that expands so far beyond your ability to hold it you can feel your heart, hurting, and all you want is more of that kind of hurt - and there has been the kind of loss that made it feel impossible the world was still spinning, and there were people, somewhere, standing on line buying toothpaste or milk. 

There have been times when I’ve clung to a story or a person or a version of events because I thought without them I might not exist, or might not want to exist. Everything I thought I knew has changed in a week, many, many times. There are two incredible people who put their feet down on this spinning planet every day, who wouldn’t have shown up if I hadn’t kept moving forward, even when everything fell apart. And there have been people who no longer put their feet on the ground, and the fact that gravity doesn’t pull on them anymore has felt impossible, because where are they, other than in my heart? So many things could have turned out differently, but they didn’t. There are a lot of stories I could have told you today, but only this one came out of me. 

Maybe the squirrel on Caterpillar Rock was quiet and curious and trusting, even if a little confused, because I was all those things, then. And maybe the squirrel screaming at me last month was screaming because sometimes I get scared of all the raging uncertainty in this world. Maybe things around us are always a reflection of what’s happening inside us, and every day is a new day to decide what story you’re going to tell yourself, and what story you’re going to share.

We’re always losing ourselves and losing other people, ending up on a corner alone, wondering where everyone went. And then all of a sudden we turn that corner and walk smack into an old friend, or we make a new one, or we do something or say something or feel something that reminds us of who we are, even if we are always changing. It could be that the trick is to embrace the losing and the finding again, the loving and the falling apart, the knowing and not knowing, and to try to keep telling ourselves the stories that give us enough courage to keep going. What else is there, really?

Other than squirrels.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about uncertainty, loss, time and the way it folds in on itself, the stories we carry, the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones we choose to share, I’ll be here 10/25/24 at 11:15am PST - or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. As ever, I’m so grateful for your amazing comments and shares, and the fact that I get to travel along with you and check in each week. It’s like turning the corner and bumping into an old friend.