I prefer rain to rays, crying to laughing, and analyzing to “enjoying the moment.”  Sunny Sunday afternoons fit in somewhere—add crapass central park to the mix, and we’re good to go, destination Hell.

Once upon a Oncewife life, I frequented the park while the Wasband was working long weekends.  I didn’t mind it so much, knowing he’d have preferred to be with me than at work.  He was sacrificing for us… or at least that’s what I told myself.  It was all about his career, and not at all to do with “our.”  Still, I sat in the park with a book and a blanket, alone, wishing my picnic could eclipse loneliness and envelop him.  Do that enough times, see enough McClaren strollers, and you learn to avoid the park altogether. That, or you link arms with a band of bikini broads and hit Sheep’s Meadow with a thick stack of magazines fanned on towels. You listen to a stranger wearing too much patchouli attempt American Pie on guitar, wishing the music really would die.  It’s so lose lose.

My mother tells me she spent my childhood crying in parks.  “I felt like a single mother.  I was always alone.”  I’d heard this for years, my mother’s unhappiness with the amount of time my father spent with her on weekends.  It felt like a warning.  I didn’t want to be alone on weekends, crying in parks feeling single either.  Of course, that’s exactly what happened.

So now, when Sam Champion says “Mostly Sunny,” I’ll elect to stay inside, clipping split ends as I create a back-to-back moron marathon of Clueless, Mean Girls, and Bring It On.  Oh yes, that’s exactly how I spent my Sunday.  I was depressed.

Upon invitation, I agreed to ball throwing lessons in Riverside Park.  The twirl of a football, curve of a rising fastball, my hand sweaty in a catcher’s mitt.  I watched a redheaded girl make piles of grass and sprinkle the blades into a nearly empty soda can.  Children with helmets on plastic bicycles with colored streamers looked back toward parents to make sure they were watching.  “Mom did you see?  I’m doing it!”  Training wheels and strollers.  Loopy headed children with bouncing clusters of balloons.  Ice cream faces.  He made it to second base.  Small uniforms with leather gloves children will outgrow and younger siblings will inherit along with reputations.  Peewee players running after the ball, leaving their assigned positions, all at once.  The rise of dirt, in a cloud, when the ball is in play.  Cross-legged men in three layers of sweater with headphones, orthopedic shoes, and oversized glasses sit in clumps sharing benches along the water.  Cigars.  Rollerbladers slow when approaching sandy patches of road.  A shirtless man walking a yellow python snake wears it like a scarf.  The rub of nylon shorts as a beginner runner stomps and pants past.  The clicks of a ten-speed bicycle, the push and roll of the wheels of a rollerblader.  Sideline remarks of coaches, in-line baby talk from a dog lover who recently lost her dog to cancer.  Stroller wheels and long thin shadows of bicycles.  I loved but mostly hated it all.

I imagined how I felt, the amazement, when I first saw an airplane.  How engaged I was with colorful balloons or a new plastic bike.  I sat on the pier, looking at the lapping water, trying to remember firsts, and all I came up with… life is so short.  We’re here for a minute, and we have to be in it, holding what we want in life.  I should have stayed home with the chick flicks and scissors.  At least there, I could rid myself of dead ends.