I turn my attention back to the Jewish
musicians by the tree. The woman starts strumming her mandolin. She
looks up at the bearded and skull-capped fiddler with upturned
eyebrows. She is singing something in Hebrew. Then, the man raises
his violin to his chin and starts playing a slow Jewish song. It’s
mournful, like a melancholic travel song. The song is beautiful.
The violin plays his slow riffs with feeling. The woman has her eyes
closed as she sings the sad song.
The musicians have an entourage of
women with their hair covered and children. They sit at their feat
underneath the tree. There is an opened violin case, a pile of
CDs, and a small vase filled with bright pink and purple flowers.
When the song is finished, they stop playing and take a break for a
while, talking to each other and their entourage.
On a bench a little ways away is a
couple making out. Their arms and hands are covering each other’s
faces, as if trying to conceal their unconcealed act.
I almost forget we’re in the city, next
to all the taxi cabs, shuttles, and cars driving by just 20 yards
away, across the grass and in between the trees, almost forget until
an ambulence sings it’s own song, and I glance over at it and the
traffic and the brick skyscrapers and city.
The musicians start up again playing a
fast tune full of violin riffs. The girl opens her mouth and laughs
and stamps her foot. A squirel saunters over in front of our bench
and takes a quick peak at us before running back under our bench.
A white guy who has been pacing and
talking on his cell phone the whole time we’ve been here walks past
us again. He has no shirt on. His chest is covered with tattoos one
of which says, “Appetite for Destruction..” He has pulled his
pants down a little bit since the last time he passed us, and as
passes us you can see two inches of his butt crack. He stumbles
around. I’m wondering if he’s drunk.
Another person joins the Jewish
musicians’ entourage. A bare chested man with a buzzed head. He
crouches down to embrace one of the mothers warmly. Then he stands
next to another woman and his infant daughter and looks up at the
branches of the tall tree. They play on.
Their music is like a melancholy and
beautiful soundtrack to this place. The violinist plays notes on the
top strings, bending the notes while the woman sings softly her sad
song. People walk by. The benches are full. A curly haired man
talks about the medical benefits of marijuana and rants about our
government’s policy on marijuana. Couples walk by.
Hello, ladies and
gentlemen. I’m sorry for the interruption, but I need to draw you
out of Union Square for a moment. I confess that in the midst of
writing this while sitting on a bench in New York, my computer
crashed and I lost everything past this point. The worst part is
that now, as I sit in an airport in Ireland only two days later, I
can’t remember everything that happened. The rest will be from my
very spotty memory.
There was a very large muscled man with
a pony tail. He walked slowly to a bench just past us, sat down,
then got up again and left the park the way he had come. He was
sweaty and had the biggest pectoral muscles I’ve seen in person and
walked in that slow, heavy way men walk after they finish pumping
iron.
Most importantly, there was this
moment, a realization maybe, or maybe an incarnation, but where I
realized how beautiful and remarkable it was that we were in New York
city, listening to music sung in Hebrew. It was as if I realized
that God was there with us. Maybe he had been sitting there, there
next to Shorty, the whole time, but it wasn’t until that moment, when
I heared the skull-capped, bearded Jew play his violin, and looked up
in the blue sky to see a white and light grey cloud drift above the
skyscrapers like a blimp. Yes it looked like there was some huge
cloud blimp… or maybe a Macy’s day parade balloon, in the shape of
an albino Garfield the cat, a giant cloud mascot who was observing us
in Union Square park and thinking how silly and beautiful we all
were. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized he was there.
