A Wolf in the Meadow?

New York City, Manhattan Island: so many people, so little that eye contact.  On our little block on Warrington in Detroit, we had thrived on eye contact.  Our faces helped each other feel safe, cared about, known and appreciated.  But here my brother Dan warned me, as we left his nondescript red brick ten-story apartment building in the Garment District, to stop that, greeting people on the sidewalk, saying “good morning.”  I gave him my little brother “Yeah, yeah” smile but he said it again, big brotherishly.  “You don’t do that here.”  Even in the Grand Street Subway station, when people entering the turnstiles faced those exiting the adjacent turnstiles, there was not a glance at each other.  On the subway as we rode up toward Central Park I noticed that people would look at others, but look away when their looking was noticed by their subjects.  There was curiosity, but not communication.  When we
emerged on Fifth Avenue a few blocks south of the park, I was stunned by the density of pedestrian traffic on the sidewalks, sidewalks that I assumed were under all those feet, packed together in a movement that almost obliterated individuals in what seemed to be a somber conga line, a snaking movement one behind the other.  Missing, sadly missing were the hands on hips of the one in front, the winding, the kicking, the bopping, the smiling.  Here was only the following.  They all seemed to be so resolute, so focused. 

Perhaps that’s why the Sheep’s Meadow surprised and delighted me so much.  There in the middle of Central Park was, well, a meadow, a rolling green grassy open space surrounded by mature trees on which people were relaxing, just lying there in ones and twos and little gaggles, calm as the cool carpet growing contentedly beneath them.  It does not surprise me now to recall how Dan brushed off my suggestion that we stop, he walking straight on his invisible path, his shortest-route-is-a-straight-line to our destination, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  My own path had bent instinctively toward the meadow, my feet having their own wisdom, and I had to run a few steps to catch up with Dan, on his straight-and-narrow.

And perhaps that is why, some months later, I was lifted and then dropped as I read a letter from Dan, describing the unseasonably warm fall day that he had actually gone to the Sheep’s Meadow to sit in the sun, and how he was then and there convinced that he had to leave New York City, that he had had enough of it.  What was it that he experienced there in the sun on the grass that had literally sent him packing to move from the city that he loved and raved about?  He wrote that sitting there in the sun, he had allowed himself to lie back, to feel the green coolness of the grass on his back and the look at the clouds in the blue sky, and soon the warmth of the sun closed his eyes, and he fell asleep.  His words returned to me, “You don’t do that here” even as I continued to read, and an ominous feeling took root in me.  He wrote that he had awakened with a start, and when he opened his eyes, he saw a guy a few feet away looking at him.  He felt vulnerable.  He felt violated.  My big brother, who had walked into fistfights in Detroit in stairwells of the wastewater treatment plant where he worked, who had gotten drunk and crawled into shrubbery to sleep it off until morning, carefully folding his glasses so he wouldn’t roll over them in his sleep and break them – my big brother ran from New York City because of a look.

I wondered what he had feared.  I wondered whether it was homophobia, or perhaps a fear of suppressed gender issues in himself, or the image of being robbed or mugged there on the meadow, among the other sheep.  What wolf had he feared?  We talked about it on the phone.  The guy, he said, had not said anything to him.  There had been no chance, because Dan had bolted up and headed for the subway.  I never did find out why that experience sent him to St. Paul, Minnesota, a place geographically and sociologically opposite from New York, equidistant from Detroit, as far from me again, but in the other direction.  He wanted to go to a place, he told me, where he could close his eyes without somebody looking at him.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.