What Never Happened: An Observation

by Nick Stokes

year where we lived. Since I was not in school, it must have been a Saturday. Presently, I arrived in the park, which was clotted with people. I was able to nevertheless find a free oak tree under which to take my lunch. This tree was ideal because it was large, old, and in the corner of the park farthest from where young ladies sunbathed in little more, and sometimes a little less, than underwear, and where young and old men and old ladies ogled them. This oak, then, was in the portion of the park with the lowest population density, which also owed to the fact that it had no lake frontage (the path around the lake being a popular artery), no playground or pool (reducing child-produced noise density), and no picnic shelters, benches, or barbecue pits. In short, there were no attractions. It was free green space and trees. It was the most peaceful place in the park, and peace is what I was looking for. It is easier to observe details when their quantity has been mediated, if only by a trick of the mind. (There are of course infinite details in a pinprick.) With less skin, less shrieking, and fewer children, dogs, or old men playing chess, I was better able to commence my task.

  The sunlight passing through the tree was dappled. That is all I will say about that. You can imagine, but you can never experience it because it is gone. The effect was not unlike being underwater, floating. Enough. The grass was shorn and patchy and strewn with large oak leaves of various shades of brown. Also, there was a smattering of shredded oak leaves. I leaned against a buttress of a root before it plunged into the ground. There was a slight breeze rustling the leaves and stirring wisps of my hair (blonde, as a boy). The tree’s bark was thick and furrowed, the tree itself gnarled with many long, strong arms held aloft like a mother hen spreading her wings to protect her brood. Through the skeleton of branches and skein of leaves, blue patches of sky were discernable. I could barely hear the cheers and guffaws of a far-off baseball game. It smelled like the end of summer. Blades of grass were bent where I had placed my hand to help me sit down. The track of my bike led to where my bike lay carelessly on its side adjacent to me.

  My peanut butter and jelly sandwich was perfect. My mother had made it precisely, according to my specifications. It was as if she used a micrometer to measure the perfect thickness of peanut butter and apricot jam, even though I saw her spread them each with a few deft strokes of a knife. Her cutting off the crust and eating it was an agreement we had come to long before without discussion, as it suited us both. The bread was soft, the peanut butter crunchy and salty, the jam sweet. Soon though, the peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth and I was unable to swallow. I had nothing to drink. My gullet was clogged and the situation was dire, and I briefly considered the possibility of expiring under that grand old oak. Then I remembered my apple. I took a desperate bite. The apple was crisp and juicy and tart, the perfect bride to my sandwich. The combined effect of the juice and solid chunks of apple did the trick of penetrating, lubricating, and finally dissociating the cement plugging my throat. Henceforth, I consummated every bite of sandwich with a bite of apple. Every subsequent swallow was a pleasure. My mother packed delicious lunches whenever she sent me out for the afternoon.

  Though I setup shop in a corner of the park that did not have people crawling out of the woodwork, life there teemed. Ants carted my crumbs on their backs to a nest I could not see. The ants were often smaller than the crumbs they hauled, and so were completely hidden underneath them. Under such circumstances, it appeared that the crumbs moved of their own volition. Ants occasionally veered onto my legs, but finding nothing but patched pants (I was the kind of boy who wore pants all summer long), they would dismissively return to the ground with little bother. I swatted a fly that landed on my knee, and it fell amongst some grass. It twitched as ants dismembered it and hauled its pieces off. A small cast of titmice (possibly black-capped chickadees, my avian identification skills were then in their infancy) alighted on the ground and pecked at the invisible. A squirrel, a fat red squirrel mind you, leapt into their midst and sent them into the trees. The squirrel returned to his occupation: stalking my sandwich bag, which was rolling away on the breeze. There were various cigarette butts within sight. A brightly colored (red or orange) scrap of litter lay about a foot from me. Its inner lining was foil. Probably a condom wrapper. (Little boys are never so naive as you think. I knew I was not the first person to sit in that spot and discover my surroundings.) The sounds of street traffic were behind me. A border of flowers (of what kind I failed to notice) lined the path along the lake. From the distance of my vantage point, the path was an amorphous, slinking mob of humanity. The pressure of that many people funneled into such a tight space was bound to shoot a few castoffs in my direction. Who knows, one or two of them could have likemindedly been interested in my interests. It is a pity that I could not compile their observations alongside mine in my mind, so as to paint a more complete picture.

  Two older boys, or young men, with long, stringy hair (one wore an American flag bandana folded like a headband, the other utilized a pony tail) and no shirts tossed a Frisbee back and forth. They moved like swans. The Frisbee did not touch the ground for the entirety of my stay. An older gentleman, for gentleman he was (it is not entirely unlikely that he was foreign), in linen pants, a white shirt unbuttoned to expose white chest hair, and wearing a straw hat, slowly bent over to pick up my sandwich bag, then strolled towards a nearby trashcan, periodically stopping to wait for his dog (leashed of course, he was a gentleman), a Scottish Terrier who enjoyed snuffling in the grass. The terrier pooped before he reached the trashcan. The man (a gentleman I reiterate) fortuitously utilized my sandwich bag (though it was small and transparent, the dog’s poop was also small and the bag formed a sanitary border) to pick up the dog’s poop and, finally, deliver it to the trashcan. A mother in a breezy yellow sundress followed her toddling son, making a straight line of his zig-zag. He zigged. He crouched to inspect some interesting thing, a discarded straw, an apple core, a leaf somehow different than the other leaves. He picked it up and raised it to his face and groaned with pride of accomplishment. She congratulated him on his achievement, cooed and clapped for him, and told him not to put it in his mouth. He zagged; he disappeared into a valley in the uneven terrain (he was short). Not far from me, a woman of indeterminate age half fell, half plopped herself down next to a stroller piled to overflowing with bags themselves full near to overflowing. She was a large woman, wearing gray clothing and too much of it for the heat, and it appeared as she fell/sat/plopped that she was not entirely in control of her body. I cannot speculate about her faculties, though there was some vacancy in her eyes. She in fact was under the same tree as I, but the canopy was large and she was still some 30 feet removed and on the opposite side of the trunk, so that I was beginning to feel conspicuous craning to observe this obese and apparently homeless woman. She, though, took no notice. She lay back (again not holding her weight for the entire descent, but at a certain point going into freefall and landing with a small thump; she was well-cushioned) on her back, looked up at the sky, and heaved a great audible sigh.

  Lying down after a pleasing lunch was not a bad idea, so I did the same. I looked up through the tree and its layers of shifting, lobed leaves and intertwined branches at the blue sky. If there were nothing to distract me, and if my bodily wants could somehow be provided for (for instance if I were able to tap into the tree’s root system, I would hope symbiotically instead of parasitically), I could watch the sky through tree branches forever. There is an infinite variety of detail to observe there. (If a baby is crying inconsolably, shake a branch for him or her. He or she will watch it and forget their woes. I learned this in Africa, where they have many things that we never had where I grew up, such as giraffes, famine, oil, and the origins of man, but where they still have babies and branches.) The woman began to snore. I fought the urge to inspect her more closely. I especially wanted to know what was inside the black garbage bags on her stroller. For some boys, such a clandestine investigation would have been undertaken with relish, but, first of all, I
was clumsy. Moreover, however, I was not the type to be enticed by wrongdoing or the threat of being caught or the possibility of making a spectacle of myself, and did not yet possess the strength of will to intimate myself into another’s private life, let alone to unabashedly pry into another’s belongings like a thief in the night. So I do not to this day know what she had in her bags. I have since discovered that homeless people often collect cans or bottles, for which they can receive change, though I don’t think that she had cans or bottles on the stroller. I have no evidence for that opinion. Just call it personal bias.

  I heard a man hawking ice cream and sat up. I was a boy, and ice cream sounded like a very good idea. And my mother, knowing something about boys in general and me in particular, had sent me out that afternoon with two dollars. Everything was working out splendidly. The ice cream man rode a white bike, pulling a small white clattering cart in which was, presumably, his ice cream. He toiled and sweated without a path