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The English Garden around 11 oclock in the morning

 

Yesterday, August the third, my friend Tom and I took our walk through Central Park. We always meet at 96th Street Central Park West and walk east from there through the ravine to the falls where we sometimes go up the hill from there and walk down into the Conservancy Gardens, and sometimes we walk around the Meer and enter The French Garden from there. Yesterday was cloudy which was fine with us, but then the summer sun stayed there right behind the clouds and things got muggy, but our walk was comfortable enough.

Tom has COPD so we often take breaks and sit or stand looking down at a stream or fall. We have our favorite spots, and yesterday we talked about wills. Tom asked me if I wanted two paintings by our friend, Ralph Collazo, who died of AIDS in 1990. “Of course.”

“Death is like salt,” someone said: “Without it, Life would have no flavor.” The older one gets the more one talks with friends about the end, and the more one values one’s friends. There are things only Tom and I can talk about, of people we know and knew, and particular times over the last forty years that we have known each other. 

Everywhere we walked was overabundant; there was so much beauty, it almost crowded us out. The cicadas were chirring, sure sign in the middle of summer that the end is coming, but there will be the beauty in the autumn and when, forgetting climate change, some snow will fall.

I took these pictures in the English Garden yesterday an hour before noon. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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