Girl Next Door - Softcover

‘Green lungs’. Isn’t that what they call parks in big cities? It isn’t true in New York. In New York, Central Park – almost 850 acres of priceless real estate in one of the world’s greatest cities – is not the lungs. It’s the heart. Walk around any of the paths, away from the hullabaloo, the tourists studying maps, the omnipresent runners, the pretzel sellers, and you’ll find benches everywhere. There are more than 9,000 of them. Since 1986, the Central Park Conservancy has run a programme called Adopt-a-Bench, allowing residents of the city to dedicate one to someone they have loved, and love still. Here is where you feel, and hear, the heart of the city beating. There’s a marriage proposal on a bench by the Zoo. Statements of joy and happy memories and grateful thanks on rows of benches by playgrounds – at the Alice in Wonderland statue, facing the Carousel, along the water. Since 9/11, there are benches that can make you tear up, just reading the plaques. For young men and women, dead too soon, and those they left behind. ‘To the world you were one person. To one person you were the world.’

I chose Cedar Hill for mine. It was one of your favourite places. In the winter, children toboggan there, filling the air with their laughter. In the fall, the colours are extraordinary. In the summer, it’s close to the ice-cream truck that parks on 5th, and shady. But I may like spring the best of all. Full of promise and new beginnings. Not for me, maybe, but for the people I watch.

I wondered for a long, long time how to inscribe the plaque. Whitman, or Emerson? Puccini? A declaration of my own?

In the end, though, I chose just your name. Everything else belonged to me, and I kept it inside, written on my heart, and not in this one.