Sunday in the Park With Tova

On a Sunday afternoon when she was five years old, in a sweet green park beside a wide river that flows slowly, with a stately burden of ducks and swans and geese, below a theater shaped like a large tent on the rise of a hill under the kind of sun that a summer day unwraps early and pins up high in a lucid blue sky above a narrow, black and winding road that runs through a sweet green park beside a slow river, my daughter ran out in front of a car.

The car was a Cadillac, ‘Cadillac’ being the kind of fact that climbs into the memory uninvited, enters without hesitation and never leaves, a fact that I must have recognized then from the fine texture of the egg-crate grille and the bold coat of arms on the crown of the hood and the curve of the fender and something authoritative about the way it moved along the narrow black road, heavy and sure of itself, which was surely intended by a roomful of designers in Detroit when they first sat down to consider the effect that a Cadillac ought to have, when they later huddled over their charcoal sketches in fluorescent rooms, and sculpted rough prototypes from huge blocks of brown clay, smoothing and refining the shape until the factory at last tooled up its presses and its breaks and began, with a factory’s dark harmonies of percussed metal and pneumatic hiss, to stamp and bend and fold great sheets of hot steel into bumpers, one of which was now moving with weight and authority along a narrow black road under the trees in the sweet green park until it was ten feet away from my daughter at the moment her hand slipped free of mine.

My hand was slick with sweat, slick from the heat of the pin-up sun and the warmth with which I clung to hers, a warmth well-stoked by my awareness of the broad gulf that I knew to lie between the feathery impulses of small girls and the gravitas of large cars, but it wasn’t so much that my hand was slick as it must have been the sudden raw power of the delight with which she caught sight of a playground that lay beyond the black and narrow road, a playground where the year before her big sister had won a huge glass jar full of jellybeans by guessing their number (which was an absolutely enormous jellybean number), a playground with an ice-cream stand in a patch of shade beyond a scrim of trees that was much too thin to conceal from my daughter the bright red cylinder of a long plastic slide, much too thin as well to conceal the round platform spinning, spinning above a bed of shredded tires, definitely much too thin to conceal the rank of black swings that hung straight down on their chains like a row of roped convicts on a gallows, a playground that called out to her with an urgency that required a restraining grasp much firmer than mine, my weakling’s grasp that served only to add a propulsive force, as if from the release of an elastic band, when she tugged free of it and found herself a second later in the middle of the narrow road where the authoritative car moved towards her with its sculpted lines through the sweet green park that shimmered with heat and sudden stillness.

The driver had no time to honk although, just then, a honk was certainly hanging in the air, most likely from a swimming goose much angered by a wayward duck, or perhaps by a child who had wandered away from a picnic on the shady banks of the slow brown river and passed too close behind the goose’s fine white tail, an act which would have placed the child very near the goose’s tail but very far from harm, or it could have simply been a blue canoe sliding softly through water that the goose considered to be its own, considered it to be the goose’s own ever since that goose had spent the long winter nesting with all the river’s other birds in an old barn beside an arena that sat, like the theatre, above the slow river as the river flowed beneath a shell of ice until the spring scoured the river free of its frigid sheath, until a bagpiper wearing a kilt that smelled of mothballs arrived at the old barn and played Loch Lomond as he led the birds down the shallow hill past small clusters of smiling citizens and a scatter of bored reporters towards the sluggish river, a parade of pale ungainly birds that waddled past the arena and its piles of filthy Zamboni waste dwindling in the recent sun, their wings folded over their fat bodies like shoulder pads, wings freshly clipped at the tips to prevent any form of flight beyond a slapping of their mighty feathers against the soft water, to hold them prisoner to the beauties of the warm slow river as it slid through the green park under the lazy trees all summer long, to limit them to gliding on the current with apparent grace, until a duck or a child or a blue canoe might cause a goose, the strutting glory of its annual part in a spring parade now long forgotten, to unleash an angry honk which, had it been the kind of honk a Cadillac can make, might well have helped but didn’t.

The honk of the goose was succeeded in an instant by a squeal of brakes, a sound no doubt too harsh and high and imperial to be muted, even at a moment when all other sounds strangely disappeared from where I stood beside the narrow road that ran through the sweet green park, a park otherwise so often rich with sound, rich with the thunder of cannon booming from the theatre roof to announce the rising of a new curtain on an ancient play, its thin skeins of smoke rising into the hot sky before breaking up into whiskery shreds, then snuffing to nothing beneath the ribald sun, a park so often rich as well with the eager flatulence of the trumpets that recalled the audience to their places in the auditorium as the intermission ended, rich too with the ghostly plaints of lovesick swains or hopeless kings drifting out through open doors to mingle with the crystalline cries of children spinning, spinning above the bed of shredded tires, or swinging with happy cries upon their gallows, but now a park that was silent except for a hog-squeal of brakes.

In the honk and squeal, the heavy front end of the Cadillac dipped sharply, like an elephant or camel dropping to its knees to receive an awful burden, and the driver, who was grizzled and gaunt and whose eyes were wild with an instant speculation, flung open his door and stepped into the road to find out what might lie beneath his bumper, which was nothing at all except hot and empty pavement, because my daughter’s wild eyes were looking at me from where she stood just beyond the heavy Cadillac, through the shuddering air that rose in viscous undulating shimmers from the car’s hot hood, and my own wild eyes looked back across that ever so wide and narrow road and saw in hers a sudden knowledge of what almost was, and what somehow wasn’t, and how immensely little lies between these things and always will.

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 Izzy Ferguson is an emerging/aging writer based in Dundas, a small town in Ontario. He recently shuttered a 35-year architectural practice and is now—after three long-listings and one short-listing for Canada’s national CBC Literary Prize—trying to accelerate the emerging and slow down the aging.