This weekend I will be heading to New York with H. Meeting up with one of her friends from her Leuven period who now is getting his doctorate at Harvard (I think). I was in New York earlier this year, on my way back from Belgium to Chicago, I stopped in New York for two days. I was a bit jet lagged and did not take in as much of the night life as I should have, but you really can't compare it to anything else. Big, bright, busy and full of beautiful people who are way better dressed than you are. When walking in Central Park you feel as if you are in a movie set. Think about all the movies or TV series you saw in which Central Park is featured. I saw so many Law and Orders and crime movies that I expected to find a body in the shrubs if only I would look hard enough. It made me think about a lot. I saw the John Lennon memorial, the corner of Cental Park called "strawberry Fields" dedicated to John Lennon with a mosaic spelling out "Imagine" set in the pavement. I tried to imagine what New York must have been like in the seventies, when John was walking around here, playing in Central Park with his little kid, when Times Square was still seedy, little Italy was still the place were mobsters roamed the streets and where the Ramones played in every club of the lower East Side. The New York from Taxi Driver and Lou Reed, rather than from Sex and the City and Macy's Thanksgiving parade. Don't get me wrong, New York is great, it seems like the best place in the world to live and disappear in the anonymity of the city, but as a visitor, I felt a little bit like arriving at a party where all the cool people had just left.
My very first memory of Central Park was a tape recording we had of the final concert of Simon and Garfunkel (which I always referred to as Simon and Garknuffel as a kid- you have to speak Dutch to get how cute this mispronounciation really was), which was recorded in central park. As a kid, I remember not quite understanding how one could have a big concert in a park, I did not even really know what a park was, being the country boy that I was. Walking around in central park 25 years later, I could imagine it a bit better, trying to reclaim a memory that wasn't mine to begin with.