Slim Novel 15 - http://adventuresofkimi.blogspot.com - See Homepage
19. Weekend
Friday, Eddie is free of medical school for the week and likes to walk home.
Five PM, October 4th, 1957, he notes, on his Swiss wristwatch/calendar as he starts out from the front of Jacobi Hospital on the wide, autumn-leafed Pelham Parkway. The sun is low in sky to left as he walks across the Parkway, dangerously between intersecting streets and stops briefly to pick crab apples off a tree. The trees are heavy with the crab apples and Eddie loves things nature freely gives, especially the tartly sweet, small red apples. He fills his pockets and then walks straight ahead north, at a right angle off the Parkway along a street with 1-story brick homes and he munches apple after apple and throws the apple cores away, doing a Johnny Appleseed, and happy to be Nature's tool.
As he walks he notes local kids playing in the streets. He passes boys looking up with binoculars. "Watcha lookin' for?" he asks, reverting to the Bronx accent, and one kid says "Dontchya know, da Russians just launched Sputnik da foist rocket ship? Goddamn commies!"
Eddie is not political. Wow! he thinks. Moon and Mars are next. We'll make our own Martian Chronicles. He thinks more. But I hope it's not like Ray Bradbury's story "And the Moon be Still as Bright."
Next, Boston Post Road, the Revolutionary War carriage road between New York City and Boston, running north northeast. Being a typical New Yorker, Eddie does J-walking, crossing the road, and because it is Friday late afternoon he is euphoric with a TGIF, or thank god it's Friday feeling except, when he says it, he means Thank my atheist goddess ... . It is a dangerous feeling J-walking a road with cars whizzing by and he is jarred out of his euphoria and almost killed.
He walks left at the next corner onto the east-west Allerton Avenue, alive with sidewalk shops and abuzz with end-of-week buyers. And now a warning buzz from his wristwatch: 5:30 PM. The sun is disappearing in deep twilight as he walks west on Allerton under the White Plains El train line and crosses into Bronx Park.
This walk - between the Einstein College and his family's flat - is one Eddie makes weekdays and by now he has sectioned it. Starting at the College, the sections follow as the Pelham, the Boston Post, the Allerton, the Bronx Park Crossing, and the Homepage ones. Especially in freezing winter, it helps when he reaches Bronx Park, to think I'm four fifths home. This sectioning provides a psychol-stimulus, an attraction toward his goal and a repulsion from his origin that guides him, in a psychological sense, very like, he thinks, the neuro-embryological guide that directs a neuron's axons to their final goals in a developing organism, as he once was.
Bronx Park is a north-south original forest preserved on both sides of the Bronx River as the river flows from the mountains and Kensico Dam in the north, through a slightly-to-the-east section of the north Bronx, emptying into Long Island Bay just by the Whitestone Bridge.
Eddie enjoys his thoughts as he walks but sometimes, as just now, he lapses into a low consciousness that could get him killed by a car. Just before stepping off the curb at Bronx Park East Road he clears his mind to attend to preserving his life.
On good-weather days, especially end-of-school weekdays, he enjoys the Bronx-Park part of the walk most of all because a not very deep below Eddie's surface is his Rousseauist savage that loves walking on the wild side, as he presently is after crossing the street. First entering Bronx Park comes a stone bridge over the Bronx River. On his right are bushes, trees and now comes the bridge.
George Washington crossed here and slept there, Eddie thinks, the "there" being an up-ahead house of similar stones where, everyone says, Washington slept. The bridge is constructed of breccia, a gray granite interspersed with smaller dark stones that was popular in Revolutionary War times when George Washington was sleeping around, Eddie knows, because he looked it up in his Britannica. The bridge walkway is 32 step lengths with an upward curve and at the curve's top is an indentation that fits a human body and has openings that must have been used to poke rifle tips out of by kneeling soldiers then. Below, runs a shallow torrent - the mighty Bronx River running to sea, thinks Eddie with mock drama. Recently, he read, the authorities had stocked the river with trout for local fishermen and he meant to be among them maybe even tomorrow morning.
Across the river and into the trees is in Eddie's mind because that is where his body is going now and it alludes to Ernest Hemingway's novel that all the critics panned and parodists spoof. Past the river and between the trees he walks diagonally to his right and passes a baseball field where, in the twilight, kids are playing touch football. The football hurtles in his direction, he catches it expertly and flips it back to the kid for whom it was meant, feeling like the character in an Irwin Shaw short story he'd recently read and admired.
At the west end of the park, past French Charlie's playground, he climbs a stone stairway and walks over a railroad bridge, stopping briefly to peer below and ahead south, at tracks where the every-hour commuter train runs between Grand Central Station in New York City and points north in the suburbs, ending in Boston's Union Station. Then he continues on and soon he is at the end of East 204th Street in his home neighborhood he calls Homepage.
Ten minutes later he lets himself into Apartment G 12. Passing through the entree foyer he sees Mom who acknowledges him with an "Eats'll be ready in thirty minutes. And wash your hands."
Good old Mom! He goes partway down the hall and into his room and lies down on his bed to engage in a little happy thinking.
To continue: Next, click 15.20 Paul Dudley White Appears on Rounds
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