That’s the path just west of the Ravine in Central Park, close to the road that enters from Central Park West between 97th and 103rd Streets, at sundown on the Winter Solstice, 2023. It’s the route I usually take on my way to the girlfriend’s place from where I live on 123rd, off Lenox/MX. Here’s what you would have seen from those benches, more or less, on a previous day at an earlier hour, looking northeast across the little pond—officially designated The Pool by the Conservancy—that feeds into the Loch, and thence to the Ravine, on toward the Huddleston Arch that opens onto the Harlem Meer:
As you sit there, the North Meadow rises behind you and then flattens out into many baseball fields that face each other in a satisfying asymmetrical pattern, stretching all the way over to 5th Avenue; further south there are tennis courts tucked more discreetly, as they should be, into a fold of trees, and below them is the Reservoir.
I try not to be in a hurry at this point of the journey, such as it is, because I like to tarry on those benches, even as the sun goes down, when I can feel the cold and see the darkness coming for me. It’s here that Elizabeth, Hilary, and Caroline Shea—three sisters as I like to imagine them—are seated together, facing The Pool. Each has her own eight-foot bench, but they’re bolted together for as long as somebody is maintaining the Park: they’ll be here long after I can’t stop to chat with them and watch as another solstice announces another transition.
They’re dead, of course, unless a demented uncle took proleptic measures to memorialize his nieces avant la lettre. They’re pretty cheerful, all the same, and why not? Here they are in a beautiful seam between heaven and earth, where they can remind us passersby of their existence, of how close they were to each other, and still are, and I mean to us, too. They’re not absent, and they’re not even invisible: there’s no way you don’t begin to write the story of their lives when you notice their plaques. Given these characters, you have to ask, what happened?
Me, I hear three old ladies laughing as they reminisce about their charming, alcoholic husbands, who spent a lot of time in the bars of Hell’s Kitchen, drinking and beating the shit out of other drunkards until middle age, when their experience no longer answered the stamina and skills of younger, dumber Micks. Were they cops? One or two of them, probably. Born in the early forties, they fought in what felt like wars to them, only not overseas.
I imagine the sisters at work, holding down lousy jobs and raising unruly kids, doing both with a weary, stoical cheer, knowing that they’d meet up on Saturday afternoons for a walk across town, into the Park, maybe all the way up past the Reservoir, where the kids played ball, before they started drinking. I imagine them sitting here chatting, looking at that little pond below them, and looking up the Great Hill, wondering why it’s called that when everybody knows the Blockhouse in the North Woods looks down on it. Did they ever get up there, where they could see Harlem’s southern border?
I imagine they all died at about my age, in their 70s or younger, long enough to see the 21st century, but not much longer. I’m pretty sure it was Caroline who was the last to go, because she’s the last of the three plaques on the right. It was she, not some demented uncle, who paid for the benches through the Conservancy, and made her older daughter promise to get the plaques mounted. She’s the one who kept walking even after Elizabeth and Hilary had passed.
I stopped here this morning on my way home. I sat on the bench next to Caroline’s (the middle one in the photo), leaning forward so I could see all three sisters when I turned from The Pool to address them. I was wondering if they’d still welcome my visits when I’ve passed but I’m not just passing by. I didn’t get the answer I wanted, but that’s all right. There’s plenty of room up here in this part of Central Park.