Those trees, those crows

An essay by Slabtown resident Joe McAvoy

Wallace Park in the Slabtown neighborhood has two baseball diamonds along with an expanse of green.

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

• John Lennon, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)

For what it’s worth, it was American writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders, not John Lennon, who first penned those words in, of all things, the “Quotable Quotes” section of a 1957 Reader’s Digest edition. One of the sentiments to be gleaned from this rather pithy nugget of wisdom—life and an abundance of grace surrounds us every day if we just take the time to notice—has been understood, and practiced, long before it found its way into our pop idiom. Regardless of its history, I cling to that sentiment like a life buoy these days. There’s enough darkness disseminated via the internet and social media or played out live on my beloved Portland streets to sink me into deep despair, drown me within a pool of frustration, flood my synapses with pessimism.

Shame on me when I let my sense of wonder get away.

Grace?

There are two baseball diamonds at Wallace Park in Portland’s Slabtown neighborhood. They share a grassy outfield with a myriad of users—disc throwers, fetching dogs, readers in folding chairs, sunbathers, groups of friends enjoying each other’s company on blankets—whenever the sun hints at an appearance. There are, as well, two basketball courts; a swing set; an expansive sandy area; a playground with monkey bars, elevated bridges and slide tubes; and two, count ’em two, enclosed dog parks where my trusting and trusty sidekick, Rosie, can run free. There are benches scattered all over the park, a covered shelter and a couple of picnic tables on the Raleigh side. The place is teeming with life.

The conditions of those two baseball diamonds are worth a few moments’ reflection. The infield “skins’’ could use a little lime worked in to increase the soil’s water absorbency, a little calcine clay to mop up what isn’t absorbed and increase the surface traction and “slideability” for baserunners. A little weeding, raking and mat dragging to level and smooth that surface wouldn’t hurt. The trim-line between the infield dirt and outfield grass is less than precise. The outfield could be mowed on a more frequent schedule.

Which is all to say that the ball fields at Wallace Park are in excellent shape. They’re worn in from incessant play. As they should be. I lived for 25 years on a hill just above Westlake Park on Lake Oswego’s west side. Its three ballfields were (are still?) enclosed within high chain-link fencing and locked gates, their smooth infields routinely and meticulously raked and matted, the baselines clipped and chalked, the pitcher’s mounds sculpted into elegant domes, the outfields mowed into checkered patterns worthy of an MLB stadium. It was empty, desolate and soulless most days on my walk by with my wife, Kyle, and our two dogs, Rosie and Riley (alas old friend, RIP).

There are no preventive barriers around Wallace Park’s fields to discourage a pickup game of baseball, softball, football, kickball, badminton, ultimate disc or a parent teaching their children to hit, throw and catch, a group practicing Tai chi and/or whatever other activities a bunch of kids and adults can conceive. I’ve never been one who was much inclined toward people or things looking good at the expense of being good. Substance gets my attention. Those ball fields, like the rest of the park, are overflowing with substance.

Rosie and I are partial to two north-facing benches fixed to a concrete pad on the park’s south side, just off Pettygrove. They’re the equivalent of “lower bowl” seating on the 50 yard line at a football or soccer game, offering their occupants a panoramic view of the park’s entirety under an impermeable canopy of conjoined overstories from a massive American elm and a couple of Douglas firs. The best seats in the house, in my opinion. You’re apt to find us there, rain or shine, two or three times a week in the mid-afternoon.

Our favorite moments on those benches come in late spring when the kids’ baseball season begins. You want life and grace? Those games are “big box” stores of life and grace. They have incomprehensible inventories of the stuff; whole aisles dedicated to winning, losing, parenting, bad parenting (the biggest aisle), encouragement, sportsmanship, respect, self-esteem, improvement, discipline, friendship, tears, joy, celebration, resilience, innocence. By the time I am through focusing my recently (and increasingly) diminishing attention span upon a game, there is little room left for darkness, frustration and pessimism. The world is a good place, people are kind, and hope springs eternal (if only for a moment) for Rosie and me on those benches when a game is in progress.

We needed a little surge of life to get us going on a recent Saturday morning. My writing was going nowhere. I was feeling a little shut in. The news was depressing. Rosie seemed lethargic. To the park, then. Maybe a game was under way, or some groups of children were running amok over the grass or hanging off the play structures. Something. Anything.

The weather was nothing short of magnificent. August confuses me every year. Cool mornings, extreme afternoon heat, sweater weather evenings. The park was empty, to our surprise. The dog enclosures had a buzz going but everything else was bereft of human activity. The grass field was uninhabited. There were no games underway, the baseball diamonds desolate and still, the basketball courts quiet, no kids on those swings or monkey bars. That was OK with us. We’re resilient. We don’t mind spending some much appreciated quiet time on those benches under the elm and firs. Plan B was initiated. Rosie will sniff around for new scents, I’ll fixate on something or other attracting my attention for a half hour.

I didn’t see the two bodies sprawled out on the benches until Rosie stiffened, pulling at her leash and refusing to get any closer on the final approach. A grocery cart full of bags and tarps sat within the surrounding shadows. An assortment of stuff that I didn’t bother to catalogue spilled out over the ground under the elm and those firs. A pipe and lighter, beer cans, open bags of chips and a roll of toilet paper were spread on the concrete pad and dirt under their lifeless bodies. I recognized one of the faces. I’ve seen him around Dragonfly Café recently. He’s just a kid. Early 20s maybe. Someone’s darling boy. He sits at the far end of the covered seating outside the café, his eyes circled by increasingly darkening rings each time I see him. Large ears stick out from his buzzcut head. He stares out into his own personal reality, screaming and punching his fists. He looks exhausted. Angry. Scared. On one of the best seats in Wallace Park, he now rested. He could have been one of the kids playing ball at those fields a little over a decade ago. I can’t imagine his days in the last few years.

Conceding the benches, Rosie and I turned to head home. The sun fell in amber streams filled with twinkling dust particles through the tree in the dog parks. A few leaves were turning. There air chilled my lungs, invigorating me. Fall is coming. I can feel it. A time for bigger books, longer bouts of reflection and writing. A time to stare down the existential threats that hide within me in the summer, emerging when the first specter of winter hovers over my city. A broken city lately. A city that I love. A city that I call home.

Rosie sniffed the grass as we made our way across. The crows are back. A few stragglers from the massive murder that commutes north by northwest across the azure sky every morning were hurrying to catch up. Every fall and winter, I stand at my study window in the last hour before sunset to watch them returning somewhere southeast until the last one passes. There is never a last one.

Joe McAvoy