Serendipity in the Park

If I had to single out THE thing I love most about living in New York City, it probably would be the serendipity. 

I was reminded of this Saturday when I stumbled on, and became something of an impromptu temp usher for, a wedding - just a few hundred yards from where I'd gotten married less than five months earlier, and with my daughter's wedding just two weeks away. 

Serendipity. 

Sure, the city boasts all these amazing cultural institutions, architecture, parks, waterfront, history, restaurants, vistas. But there's an electricity to tripping across completely unexpected people, sights, and sounds amidst the sheer volume of everything that takes place in a Gotham day, that can't be matched. 

Like happening upon an entire parade that, if you were a block away, you wouldn't have even known was taking place. Or walking past a manmade, Central Park waterway and suddenly having a heron take flight. Or spotting a celebrity riding the subway. Or popping into an obscure Chelsea gallery show and running into a friend who lives 3000 miles away, who you haven't seen in decades. 

I've been experiencing more of them recently, whether due to post-pandemic bounceback, the warming of the temperatures, or just - serendipity. 

For instance: during a recent crowded matinee Wednesday on a Times Square sidewalk, while captaining a Writers' Guild picket, trying to keep order between the rules of the building, the monitoring of the cops, and the steady stream of tourists trying to make it to The Lion King, I thought I saw a familiar figure in our midst, wheeling a backpack. 

"Bill?" I asked. 

I was right. It was Bill McKibben, the famous environmentalist and author, who had been a year ahead of me at Harvard and been the editor of the Crimson. At the time he was a fiery political figure wrapped up in the issues of the Irish Republican Army, and I was a culturally minded critic who reviewed movies and records like by Steely Dan, The Police, and The English Beat. 

He somewhat ironically nicknamed me "Hotsh*t Handelman," which I still carry inside on days when things feel bleak. 

I hailed him, identifying myself as "Hotsh*t Handelman." We hadn't seen each other in person since he graduated in 1982 -- 40+ years ago. He smiled and stopped and chatted, en route to a speaking engagement, wearing a cap from "Third Act," his new venture trying to give oldsters like ourselves new meaningful goals later in life. As actors, writers, and hangers on picketed in circles around us, I grabbed a selfie to commemorate the moment, thinking this was probably the only time I would see him again. 

Me and McKibben, Times Square, May 2023

(Side note: in researching this post, I found that in 2015 my classmate Melissa Block of NPR had posted to Facebook this yellowing piece by Bill, about a anti-Draft rally we'd attended organized by another classmate of mine, now-Congressman Jamie Raskin, and now Washington Post editor Chuck Lane. If you take time to read what's legible, you can see Bill's skepticism about the long-term cause. The photo is by my friend Nevin Shalit, son of Gene, who would end up an executive at New Line. I have another photo he took that night where I look way more interested in talking to a cute woman than protesting.)

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Now to this Saturday. 

I woke at 6am per usual, to remotely help produce Smerconish on CNN, then crashed for my post-show nap. When I awoke, I headed out to run some errands like picking up dry cleaning. 

But the May weather beckoned, and I decided to detour into Central Park to see if the bench plaque Syd and I had ordered to commemorate our private ceremony had been installed. 

We had been promised mid-May, but deadlines mean nothing in NYC - as we are constantly reminded by the dilapidated plywood construction shed eyesore that has stood around the corner from our building for the entire 13 years we've lived here (right), or by the fact that my neighborhood pool has been closed for 4 years while they try to find a leak. 

Well - no plaque yet. But I moseyed past throngs of Memorial Day Weekend picnickers, and the turtles, geese, and cormorants in the murky Harlem Meer.

I kept going to the Conservatory Garden, where we'd held our ceremony on January 1. 

However, the northern, French-style garden with the dancing girls fountain - where we'd stood under an arbor on a 50-degree New Year's Day, with our friend officiating while another streamed it to immediate family - is now closed for more than a year of renovations.

So I made my way to the English (southern) section, and came across a group of people in black tie. (Also, unrelated, one woman in neon green plastic armor, which turned out to be her bodywear for a clowning class she was headed to) 

The reporter in me soon sussed out the situation: a half-hour hence, 100 people would be convening for the wedding between a 6'11" groom and his less tall wife, who had lived here for a dozen years but recently relocated to LA. 

I chatted up the groom's dad (pictured up top in the hat, with the blue-haired, tatted sister of the groom). 

He had flown in from Minneapolis and was preparing to officiate and we discussed how, because they had needed a permit, Park Rangers were on hand - meaning they would enforce the no-amplification rule (ironic, since every day dozens of musician buskers break this rule all over the park and are never ticketed). 

Even a dog had gussied up for the occasion: 

But - due to NYC construction - the ceremony was forced to improvise. 

The couple had planned to be up on the wisteria-laden pergola between the two halves of the garden - but last week, with no notice, the Conservancy had erected a huge fence blocking it from the public. 

Fact is, they were better off -- especially given her long dress -- not having to deal with all those steps. 

After the bride's veil and flowers were readied, her planner showed her a graph on her cell phone - - was it a stock market price? 

No, turns out, the bride has diabetes and had a concealed monitor stick on her inner arm to make sure her insulin was on track. 

I volunteered to block passersby from ruining the sightlines of the procession beneath the crabapple canopy. It was picture-perfect.

And - just when you thought you had enough serendipity for one Saturday - randomly this couple walked by:

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Update: the professional photographer has published his blog about the couple (Taylor & Kris)'s wedding weekend, so I thought I'd add it in here for posterity. 

Remembrance of Bike Rides Past

Feb 2005, "The Gates" 

A recent NYC history blog post about a statue fragment - more on that in a moment - reminded me how much a simple half-bike attachment (pictured above) ended up playing a key role in my maintaining a connection to my daughters after my divorce.

As a freelancer working at home whose wife worked full-time, I'd been more involved as a caregiver than most Dads. I bought a tag-along for my bike, and installed a seat on the front bar for my younger daughter, and we often tooled around the city to appointments on it -- in those pre-bikelane days often riding on side streets and even sidewalks to avoid traffic.

Central Park dogs

The rides were filled with adventures we wouldn't have had any other ways; once, we passed a parked bus, and the driver used his PA system to inform me that my daughter was not pedaling and simply taking a free ride, shaming her into action.

Weather permitting, I'd take my older daughter across the park to her school on the east side, and we would count the numbers of dogs we passed (once we hit 100!) or clock the number of different state license plates we spied.

After moving out, I wanted to do everything I could to provide continuity and stability. But all I could afford was a one-bedroom sublet -- on alternate weekends they gamely slept on the pullout couch -- and then I got a TV writing job in L.A., which would help me pay for their schooling, but pull me even farther from them.

The kids were able to visit me, and took a quick shine to year-round beach weather and showbiz; my older daughter even made an impromptu cameo in an episode of West Wing. (That's her smiling at Bartlet as he takes the stage around the one minute mark.)
But I didn't want to lose a foothold of their real lives back in New York.  My younger daughter was just starting kindergarten.  Luckily, my boss let me take a few three day weekends to return to the city to maintain custody.  Unbenownst to my kids, those visits also usually included a trip to lawyers' offices or court to hammer out the divorce details, so it was important to me as well to have as much normalcy outside those difficult hours.

The bike came in handy as a way to extend our too-brief time together -- instead of putting them on a school bus, we'd have the adventure and conversation during the trip. (It also, it turned out, absolved my older daughter of the social discomfort of explaining to busmates why she wasn't getting on the bus at her usual stop, something I hadn't anticipated.) The "tag-along," as we christened it, gave us an identity, even a community; we'd excitedly point out other parent-child bike combos en route.

So even after my sublet ended, and I stayed in hotel rooms and apartment swaps, I still kept the bike around and took them to school on it when weather permitted. We fell into a regular route across the park and then emerged at Fifth Avenue south of the Met, and trial and error taught me the least-travelled street was East 80th. We started to look forward to the regular sights as reassuring talismans: the "Doggie Gym" on First Avenue (right) became so popular we'd actually leave for school earlier so we could stop and watch through the windows.

But our most beloved marker along the route was a head. A lopped-off statue head, sitting idly next to some trash cans outside a brownstone just east of Madison Ave. on 80th street. We became so fond of it we would wave and yell "Hi, head!" We had no idea where it was from, or what it was doing there, but it was definitely one of those "only in New York" sights.

Of course, the girls grew up. My younger daughter moved from the front-seat to the tag-along, and my older daughter rode her own bike (see photo up top, at Christo's remarkable Gates exhibit).

The tag-along was not without its mishaps: in 2005, I was  trying to be safe by riding my daughter to school on a sidewalk, I was surprised by a car pulling out of a recessed garage (left). I stopped short, and the whole weight of the bike and a half and its two riders -- landed on my ankle, tearing a ligament.

I limped her the rest of the way to school and then straight to the orthopedists. It was the beginning of the end of the era.

Trying to keep the three of us together, I did briefly own a tandem bike that I tried to hook the tag-along to, but it was laughably unwieldy.

Eventually I passed the tag-along to a neighbor with an age-appropriate daughter. I've moved back and forth to LA a half-dozen times for work my kids are now in high school and college, and now if I am lucky enough to grab either for a bike ride it's on adult bikes.

But yesterday I got an email from the Ephemeral New York about the sculpture head that brought me back -- and made me wonder about its magic powers. It turns out the New York Times' architecture critic Chritopher Gray had explained its origin in 2004 -- right around when I was doing my school shleps.

The house at No. 52...was owned until 1998 by Jerry Hammer, a theatrical producer, who now lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., but left the statue when he sold the house. Mr. Hammer said that in the 1960’s he was riding in a limousine with the developer Zachary Fisher, who motioned to the old Ziegfeld Theater, at 54^th Street and the Avenue of the Americas, and said he was going to demolish it for a new office building.

Mr. Hammer said he pointed to a limestone head on the front of the building and asked Mr. Fisher for it as a joke. “Then,” he said, “about four months later, I hear noises outside, and it’s a truck with a crane, and a head, and they ask me where I want it.”

So the head came from the Joseph Urban facade of the old Ziegfeld theater -- built in 1927, financed by William Randolph Hearst, first home to the musical Showboat, later a movie theater and then a TV studio (Perry Como and the Emmys both broadcast from it.)

I think the woman is one of the two flanking the upper part.

So what's the magic power? All these years later, both my daughters are firmly ensconced in the theater, both at their schools and in their lives. Maybe that head was an augur.