Saturday

One of the things I’ve been struggling with recently is whether to write about my personal life, and if so, whether to publish what I write. There’s a subtle relationship between these two questions — whether to write, and whether to publish — and its orientation is the opposite of what I would have expected. That is, I mostly think that I should not publish much about my personal life. Then, every time I sit down to write, I think to myself, “I shouldn’t write about my personal life, because I shouldn’t publish that kind of writing, and therefore any work I put into it is wasted.” Then, I become so fixated on this that I can’t write anything at all.

A few years ago, in therapy, I was talking about my work and made an attempt to compare it to farming. My therapist raised some helpful and well-reasoned objections to this metaphor, but sitting here today it feels strangely appropriate. The product of my labor is whatever words I harvest from the soil of my mind. And today, what I can harvest is the following scene, which occurred on a recent Saturday afternoon.

I had considered going upstate for a long gravel bike ride, but the forecast upstate was suboptimal — windy and chilly and potentially wet too. As a result, at the last minute I decided to stick around the city. I would go to the farmer’s market, and do some writing, and in the afternoon I’d go back to my new favorite park, to work on my muscle-ups. In the morning I had opened most of the windows——

As I was writing this, something happened that suddenly pulled my attention away from my writing. I will not describe what happened here, but if you had been there then it would have distracted you, too. I spent a couple minutes considering a response; my heart was racing a bit, and my body was tense. Eventually the action slowed, and the tension seemed to dissipate, and I tried to set my mind back to my keyboard. As I did this I spent a minute getting grounded again, which I did by scanning, and describing in writing, the room that I was in:

I take a deep breath, or maybe you could say I issue a sigh, and look around me. It’s beautiful. I’m in my bedroom. My bedroom is beautiful, from the old, dotted, white-on-tan rug to the cool blue bedspread to the two large, healthy monsteras in the window, one of which is about to shoot out what I expect will become an enormous new leaf. I have a candle burning, and I took a shower after working out, and after showering I put on jeans, an Oxford shirt, and my closed-toed Birkenstocks, which are something like twenty years old and quite comfortable. It’s a little after 19:00 — the sun will set in about an hour — and the sky has cleared up, and the wind died down. The windows are still open, and I can hear birds outside, and the occasional passing car, and the wash of traffic noise coming from Nostrand, and from Eastern Parkway. Every few minutes a revving engine adds its urgent punctuation, which feels both angry and pleading at the same time.

So anyway, on Saturday afternoon I went to the park, to work out, at almost the windiest, and the coldest, time of day. I got there around 15:10, chatting briefly with a couple of the guys there when I arrived, and thanking one of them for showing me his graceful and extremely challenging back dips the day before. Then I warmed up quickly and thoroughly, my body a little tight, and as I warmed up I removed my grey base layer, keeping on my light blue, long-sleeved sun shirt, its snug hood stretched over my khaki baseball cap. I was being careful with my form, it being my second day in a row doing this same workout. But I felt kinda great, too.

My workout right now is all bodyweight, low reps, with three or four minutes between work sets. It’s basically old guy park gymnastics, some pull-ups and some pistol squats and (someday soon) some muscle-ups. Between sets I sat on a milk crate, taking sips of electrolyte water and popping the occasional sports gummy to keep myself motivated. In maybe a third of my set breaks I walked over to some other area of the park, playing with a novel movement or skill. Often I try things that I’ve seen someone else do first, like those back dips, which had me slack-jawed when I first saw them and quickly became an obsession. I love watching people work out, love seeing people try hard things, love seeing them succeed, and struggle, and persevere. This is one of the great pleasures of working out in public spaces: The opportunity to watch someone do something, and to think to oneself, “I wonder if I could do that too.”

I also love looking around the park, seeing what’s going on. The outdoor workout area is small — I think it’s something like forty by eighty feet — but densely equipped and occupied. Its energy is infectious, and it would be impossible, and pretty weird, to ignore it. A generator is almost always running, though you can’t always hear it because of the music, which comes through a speaker that’s at least ten inches in diameter. Recently the music has been a lot of old Drake and Lil Wayne, and there’s frequently reggae playing, and today I was delighted to hear a bunch of 2000s-era hip hop, including Mos Def’s Ms. Fat Booty, Freeway and Peedi Crakk’s Flipside, and Common’s The Light.

I don’t know who was playing the music, but I appreciate the work they put into it. I appreciate everyone in the park. As is usually the case, on this particular afternoon there were four guys playing dominoes in the back, with a few more nearby watching. Another couple guys hung out on the park benches along the left side, towards the playground. At any given moment two or three guys were actively working out. At any given moment three or four guys were actively smoking joints, sometimes while playing dominoes, and sometimes while sitting on a park bench, and sometimes while doing burpees, or parallel dips, or pull-ups. The wind was waning, and it had warmed up a bit. My workout was going great. Gin and Juice came on, and then a Busta Rhymes song that I didn’t know.

At this point my writing was interrupted again, but for a very different reason. The reason was that I needed to make myself dinner.

Very early in our separation, I was talking with another separated parent, and they informed me that the only custody schedule worth keeping was a 2-2-5-5. “Everyone should get on a 2-2-5-5 as quickly as possible,” this person told me, and I took it to heart, and after a couple of months we did indeed adopt a 2-2-5-5. In a 2-2-5-5, the kids spend two days with one parent, then two days with the second parent, then five with the first parent, then five with the second. The result is that each week, I either get my kids for Wednesday and Thursday only, or for the five-day stretch including Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. On the flip side, I always have Monday and Tuesday off, and every other week, I’m also off Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — five continuous non-custodial days.

I bring this all up because as I was writing this, on Saturday, I was in the middle of a five-day stretch off. And what this means, and stick with me here, is that that night’s meal, which I cooked and ate alone, was the most carefully-prepared one I made all week.

This is a thing I’ve been doing: Making elaborate romantic gestures towards myself. “Saturday should probably be date night,” I decided a few months ago, “and it doesn’t matter how many place settings are on the table, or who I’m eating with.” Once I decided this, I realized that most of the other nights should probably be date nights too. My kids know this now, and seem to agree, and they put real work — physical and emotional — into our meals together. I like to think that the caring, attentive attitude of our date nights will spill over into the rest of their lives. And I think it’s spilled over into my new, non-parental life too, as I have come to find a lot of pleasure in turning every night — even my solo ones — into a date.

I’ll have you know that my cooking on date night gets fairly elaborate. On this particular night I made strip steak with asparagus, ginger, green garlic, brown rice, and drizzles of soy sauce and lime juice. I ate by candlelight, thanking myself and complimenting the cook. Then I washed the dishes, and wiped the counters, and sat down to write again.

I love the way that weed is smoked at the park. I haven’t smoked weed there myself — I try not to smoke, due to asthma — but I honestly really like the idea of doing so. Sometimes it seems as if all the other adults in the park are smoking weed——

Yet another interruption: What sounds like two bullets fired outside. The sound, whatever it was, came from somewhere within a half-block of my bedroom. I froze for thirty seconds or a minute, a time during which I heard nothing else of note, and then slowly peered out the windows towards the street. Total calm. I looked onto the block for a minute, then sat back down, tentatively, to write.

The first squad car came onto the scene hot. I could hear its engine accelerating as it sped down my block, and as it came into view it nearly launched off of the speed bump right outside my bedroom window. Within a few minutes there were dozens of cops waving flashlights back and forth outside, looking, I assumed, for a shell casing. It was 23:29, and I wanted to finish describing my park scene, and then go to sleep, but the scene around me just kept grabbing me, distracting me, demanding my attention. Things seemed to stabilize, though, and within five or ten minutes I felt able to focus on my writing again, though I maintained a partial view of the street so that I could monitor for developments. By midnight most of the cops were gone; no new developments emerged, leaving me unsure of whether my attention had been warranted.

I should say, the weed that I have witnessed being smoked is all within the outdoor fitness area of the park. I assume that weed may be fair game in the basketball and handball courts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people were smoking at the track. But I’d bet that there isn’t much weed being smoked in the playground. I have good reason to believe this, partly because it’s the norm not to smoke weed in New York City playgrounds, and also because the playground at this park is directly adjacent to the outdoor fitness area, and the tree-lined fence that separates the two areas is porous enough to see through, and I’ve never seen anyone smoking weed in the playground. It occurs to me now that the tree-lined fence is probably porous enough for weed smoke to drift through as well, and in spite of the fact that I don’t see people smoking weed in the playground, there probably is, from time to time, some weed smoke in the playground. Which is honestly not ideal.

Then again, there are frequently children using the outdoor fitness area, in close proximity to joints being smoked, and while I’m sure the smoke isn’t good for them, I’m also really warmed by the intergenerational interactions I’ve witnessed. A claim like this one deserves three examples, so here’s a recent one: An absolutely jacked forty-something dad does strict pull-ups while his son, who is maybe five, plays happily with a big elastic band; when the kid wants to do pull-ups too, his dad helps him with an assisted set. Another: A trio of uniformed middle schoolers is using the bench press setup, and not being particularly careful about it, and in the course of their playful after-school workout they repeatedly drop plates off of the barbell; when this happens, a heavily-tattooed guy calls at them from across the outdoor workout area, telling the kid who dropped the plates to do twenty-five push-ups, then coaching him on his push-up form. A third: A six-year-old girl is being coached on her muscle-up progression; she can do pull-ups, and can do lots of them if her coach is assisting her, but she — like me — hasn’t quite mastered the muscle-up’s transition from pull-up to chest dip. She’s on the monkey bars while I’m doing foot-assisted muscle-ups, and she observes my form, and then says “clean muscle-up,” and I tell her that hers looked better. Her pull-ups also looked better than the somewhat older boy being coached alongside her, who struggled at both pull-ups and the monkey bars and so wasn’t allowed to try muscle-ups yet.

Or consider the occasion on which I was coached on my own park etiquette by a skull-capped and bespectacled guy, at least twenty years my elder, who informed me that upon one’s arrival, it was proper to walk around the park, greeting everyone there — advice that I found utterly touching, and that I have struggled to fully live up to.

And then, on Saturday, at four-twenty in the afternoon on the sabbath, four tweenage Hasidic kids frolicked into the outdoor fitness area. A little girl, obviously wanting to use the monkey bars, was looking for something to step up onto. I was in between sets of foot-assisted muscle-ups again, sitting on my milk crate, and when I saw her scanning for something to stand on, I offered her the crate. She waved me off and grabbed an old classroom chair that was sitting by the cable machine. She positioned the chair between the monkey bars and the pull-up bars, stood on it, and took off as if from a launch pad, taking the bouncy old rungs two at a time.

The Hasidic kids played in the outdoor workout area for maybe ten minutes, lifting barbells and running on the treadmill and flipping themselves over the incline bar. I didn’t want to mess up the girl’s launch pad, and I couldn’t really do foot-assisted muscle-ups with the chair there, so I went over to the parallel bars and futzed around a bit. Then the kids lost interest and erupted back over to the playground. A minute later I could see one of the girls on the swings, her friends nearby.

I waited to see if they’d swoop back in, then took the classroom chair and put it back by the cable machine. I continued with my foot-assisted muscle-ups until a couple older teenagers showed up and then, during one of my set breaks, promptly dominated the pull-up bars. These kids were way above my level. They inverted themselves one way and then lowered back down the other, keeping what seemed like good form and maintaining an impressive degree of control. Immediately I found myself wanting to replicate some of the things they were doing. But it was evident that their usage of the structure was wide-ranging and continuous, and there was no room for my periodic, one-set-every-couple-minutes way of working out. So I did a little balance work on the incline bar, and jumped rope a bit, and managed to grind out a few of the back dips that I had learned the day before.

One of the lessons I associate most with a life of physical activity is the understanding that you will get hurt, and you will also get rained out, and when you do, you’ll do well to a) rest, and b) find other ways of being active. If I tweak some obscure muscle, I try to think of it as an opportunity to stretch more, and strengthen, and also definitely rest. When I dislocated a finger a couple years ago, I went on some really nice walks. On days when it’s too hot for a bike ride, I can always find a pool to swim laps in.

And the thing is, I think I need to apply that same lesson to my writing.

I write this sentence down, and then spend ten minutes sitting here, thinking about it. I’m in my beautiful bedroom again, with the windows open and the lights off. It’s Monday, a few days after my Saturday park workout, and it’s getting towards midnight, and “Write” is the last thing that hasn’t been checked off of my to-do list.

But this is what my mind’s soil produced today. This was my day’s writing.