Turning Inward

As I write this, New Jersey is one week away from choosing its fifty-seventh governor.   I went ahead and voted for Mikie Sherrill, my congresswoman, over Jack Ciattarelli, but the polls are scaring the crap out of me.  Jack could very well be New Jersey's next governor, which means that MAGA values - now predominant nationally - will take over at the state level as well if that happens.  I'm ready to concede that Mikie Sherrill has been a lackluster candidate, and lackluster Democrats usually don't win elections unless they have a far, far worse opponent - so long as it isn't Donald Trump.  Jack's not quite at that level of awfulness anyway.  He's awful, but not so awful that Mikie Sherrill could get elected governor just because she has a "D" next to her name.

I've gone past the point of caring.  I'm going to turn sixty next week, and I'm turning inward toward taking care of my house, my cats, and my immediate surroundings - such as the community park I've taken more of a responsibility in taking care of, seeing ass no one else seems to have the time or the desire to do so.  Waverly Park, as the park is known (it got its name from an adjacent side street), is pretty much my only interest in the public realm.  I don't belong to the Waverly Park Conservancy.  I am the Waverly Park Conservancy.

My latest project is a bold and ambitious one.  Waverly Park was - the operative word here is "was" - distinguished by the large number of burning bushes growing in its natural, more wild side.  (The park has a landscaped side on the western bank of the brook that runs through it; the wilderness side is on the eastern bank.)  My late mother could see the bushes from a window in our house and enjoyed looking at the red and orange colors of the leaves of the bushes in autumn.   Well, they won't be there for much longer.  I have since found out that burning bushes are an invasive species from China and don't belong in a wilderness setting anywhere in North America.  Inspired by what zoologist Jane Goodall, who just died recently, said about how each of us ought to help make the world a better place and how each of us has the ability to do so, I chose to cut them all down after a lot of thought about it.

It's hardly an easy task.  The burning bushes are expansive and extensive, and they have these fibrous, dense, membrane-like root systems that make it difficult to dig into the ground and plant something different, and the stumps of the bushes are impossible to remove.   I have to put plastic tarps over the stumps (in some cases, there are clusters of stumps in one spot), cover the tarps with leaves, and leave them there for . . . a year.  Given all of the leaves that will inevitably fall from the trees above, I have to mark the stump locations with stakes so that I don't forget where the stumps are when it's time to remove the tarps.  The picture above shows only the beginning of the undertaking of this project.  

I'm moving into the most ambitious phase of taking care of the park as I look toward 2026.  I put wood filler in the picnic table I donated to the park and hope to re-stain the wood in the spring.  I am also looking to plant flowers in a more regimented fashion, as I saw in gardens in Paris and Munich this past summer, and I am planning to install a birdbath in a small lawn area where the park meets the street.  I want this park to be the best and the most gratifying community park in the region.  Also, I hope to get trees planted to replace the burning bushes - in fact, the town, which owns the land, might plant some trees for me.  Which sounds like a good idea, considering the impenetrable soil.  I didn't realize how few trees there actually are in this part of the park until I began removing the burning bushes. 

I no longer have any interest in an better, happier America.  In fact, I still hope for a national breakup into separate countries.  I also don't care about how my state could be a better place.  I can't control or even help to control either of those things.  But I can do something about this park.    

Back to the Park

When I was forced to remove the bust of Abraham Lincoln that I contributed to Waverly Park, the local community park in my neighborhood, I was convinced that I would never contribute anything to the park again, bar only a couple of flowers here and there.  But a couple of folks in the neighborhood implored me to keep up the good work.  How could I say no?

I later found a small garden pillar that someone had thrown out, with a blue metal bowl on top of it.  I immediately got out of my car to put the pillar in the back, only to find out that the bowl had been glued to the pillar.  But I managed to separate the two after I got home.  I put the pillar in a garden bed. This is the result.

For now, at least, this will satisfy my desire to have something resembling public art in the park.  But I'm already working on another idea.   I remembered that part of the vacant lot on which the park was created by the neighbors - a strip of land that runs along my back yard, approximately three feet wide - may actually be on my side of the property line.  So I can put another bust on land that's on my side of the property line in a corner of the park - and put it right up against the line - and then landscape the square footage around the bust on either side of the property line so it looks like the bust is part of the park.  Which, for all intents and purposes, it will be.

The bust will be where the strip meets the sidewalk so it will be accessible.  It won't be a Lincoln bust, though.  I donated that bust to a library in another town nearby, so having another copy of the exact same bust of Lincoln doesn't make sense when the original bust is just a few miles away in another town in the same county.   So it will be a bust of another famous American.  I've narrowed it down to John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr.  And yes, I like that Dion song.   

A Lincoln Sculpture Is a "Bust"

I'm taking a momentary break from commenting here on politics - and yes, I'll talk about how wonderfully well Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are doing - but this blog post is more personal.

Let me set things up.  Over a decade ago, a group of middle-school girls turned the town-owned vacant lot behind my house into a community park.  Called Waverly Park because its southern end borders Waverly Place, a short street that no one lives on, existing only to connect parallel avenues, the park has been enjoyed by local residents since its founding in 2013 but has not always been well-kept.  In fact, in the past couple of years, it was neglected so much that it turned back into a plain old back lot, with no plantings to beautify it and only one amenity - a bench overlooking a culvert entrance for the brook that bisects the lot.

This year, I took steps to revitalizing the park, starting with repainting the lettering on a "Waverly Park" sign that the girls made back in 2013.   I blazed a trail through the forested eastern side of the brook, planted flowers in seven different locations in the open western side of the brook, added a spur trail to connect the main trail and the street, added plastic chairs along the western bank of the brook, and added three trailhead markers that were originally legs from a table that someone had thrown out.  I even added a picnic table that I no longer needed but didn't want to throw out.     

But the biggest installation was yet to come.  back in June, I decided that everything I had done to revitalize the park said, "This is a park."  I needed something to say, "This is a park!"  I needed something to create the proper mood . . . a piece of public art. 

I went online for ideas and found bust sculptures for sale, including one of Abraham Lincoln.  That was it - I bought a Lincoln bust and also bought a pedestal in the guise of a Roman column on which to mount it.  The bust took nearly two months to make (they were made to order) and send to me, and when I finally got it, I took the bust, which was made out of fiberglass, and glued it to the pedestal, made of a similar material, with epoxy.  I also got a gray-white brick engraved with Lincoln's surname, an American flag, and a one-foot-square paving stone to put in front of it.

Here is the result.

I installed the art work this past Sunday (August 11) and I was proud of it.

Note past tense.

Yesterday (August 14), I received an e-mail from the director of my town's public works department relaying complaints the town had received from neighbors who objected to the Lincoln bust and ordering me to remove it immediately.  He said that even though the park had been started by the neighborhood and was developed by the residents without any help or input from the town apart from mowing the grassy field (visible behind the bust), the town still owns the land and has the right to reject any object placed there for decoration.  So Abe had to go.

What really hurt was that I had invited two friends from another town nearby to the park to see the sculpture.  They loved the whole park, and they loved the sculpture.  But the bust was there at the pleasure of the town officers and the neighbors, all of whom expressed displeasure and would not allow it.

Here is the site now.

I left the flowers I planted in the corners of the square block I made for the pedestal to mount in.  In the center, which can barely be seen here if seen at all, is a Japanese maple sapling one inch tall, which I got from my yard.  I removed the brick and found another use for the paving stone.

Oh yeah,  I was also ordered to remove the plastic chairs, which hadn't been a problem before.

I want to tell you all about the town of West Caldwell, New Jersey, where this was all happening here, it's a classic postwar suburban bedroom community that is, by nature, soporific.  The two friends I mentioned are from nearby Montclair, an arts community that prides itself on it jazz and film festivals and, yes, its public art in the form of modern sculptures in its own parks, so naturally they appreciated my contribution to Waverly Park as well as all of the other amenities I'd installed.  But the locals in West Caldwell are obviously, seeing as they're bedroom suburbanites who don't get a lot of action, philistines who dislike anything offbeat or interesting in their own neighborhoods to brighten up the landscape.  This art installation cost me over four hundred dollars, and now I've had to put the bust and its accoutrements in storage - my hard-earned money down the drain.  I'm now looking to see if anyone else in the area is interested in accepting the sculpture as a gift.      

While I have vowed to move to Canada if Trump is returned to power, I have already left West Caldwell.  I still live in a house that happens to be in West Caldwell, but I don't feel like I belong to what passes for the community.  I am done with trying to contribute to this town in any way, shape or form.  I have already decided that Waverly Park will be much less of a concern going forward.  Next year - assuming Kamala Harris is President, of course - I will restrict plantings in the park to just one six-pack of marigolds and one six-pack of impatiens, and I plan to reduce the number of flower beds from seven to two.  Up to now, my efforts to beautify the park had been appreciated, but when it became apparent that no one wanted a Lincoln bust there - despite the total absence of public art not just in West Caldwell but in adjacent communities as well - I didn't want to bother anymore.  I'm only planning to plant a dozen flowers next year so the park doesn't look like a total mess because, hey, I still have to live next to it.

One final kiss-off.  I just quit a Facebook group called "I Love Living In the Caldwells."

Because I don't.