This Old Park Bench

I wonder how I’ll be when I’m old. I was sitting on this park bench the other day thinking about how there are fewer park benches than there used to be. I mean, it was like you couldn’t go to a park without seeing at least one tree and at least one bench from a block away. Now you have to delve deep into the abyss of the park to scrounge up an old bench that has seen better days. It’s enough to make me nostalgic for lots of park benches with bird shit on them, with homeless men draped across them like so much wet laundry, those benches nailed to the ground in expectation of attempted thievery. It was funny then, like who’s going to steal a park bench, and yet now they’re gone, with only a vestigial bench left to keep me company when I visit.

Of course I don’t visit that park as often as I used to. As I get older it is harder to find time to just head out, to wander the city aimlessly as I used to do of a Friday night when I had nothing better to do and all the time in the world it seemed. Me and Frankie and Lucas used to take the bus down there so we could make fun of people. There were the dog walkers, dressed in various styles of sweats, the poets who sat on the arms of benches gazing at passersby, and us, the scions of our age, thinking we were making fun of it all, when we were really a part, partnered to the scene.

Then there were the old folk playing chess at the washed out picnic tables with the chess boards that looked to be falling apart even then. I wonder what ever happened to them, the boards and the old folk. That was back when I was young and I thought I was going to live forever. You know how it is. When you feel like every day is promised to you and you will never run out of them, when the dreams you have all seem so attainable, and the people you surround yourself with seem as invincible as you seemed then. But it’s now, and I’m not as young as I used to be. I’m not as naive as I once was. I see the world now for what it is: transitory.

And that’s okay. The me I used to be would have been devastated by this realization, but as I’ve grown older I realize why those park benches are gone. I realize why those old folk aren’t playing chess at those washed out picnic tables any more. They’re gone, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. One day I’ll be gone too and all I’ll leave behind are these words and this feeling. Of how it was to be me, now, in this place at this time, on this park bench that is all I have left of a time that was, of a boy who was.

So I wonder how I’ll be when I’m old, when the world has also passed me by, when those who are just twinkles in their mother’s eyes take up their positions in this world. Hopefully I’ll have these memories to pass down to them, so they’ll know how it was when I was younger. So they’ll know that nothing lasts and they need to embrace every second of every day. But until then I’ll keep coming here, sitting on this bird shit, and remembering.

Sam