Found

Today the cold wind chased me around the park. On the south-ward stretch I found a dollar bill glued with frost to the leaves in the concrete gutter.

I find things in the park whether I'm looking or not. Sometimes I run and let my eyesight drag in the leavy gutter of the road. Looking for what? I found a red ball and stuck it into two fingers of twig on a leafless tree. If the tree pitched the ball, maybe jerking in a suddent wind and letting the ball fly, it might have been a curve. It stayed in the tree for a couple of weeks, then vanished. Flung by the tree maybe, or found and plucked out by somebody who needed something to amuse a dog with.

I had put a pair of glasses I found in the same tree, sort of perched on a branch looking toward the intersection of 23rd and Flint Avenue. That corner of the park, where the oval garden offers something interesting to look at. The tree itself looking more clearly at approaching dog walkers or passing joggers. The tree watching me, its benefactor in eyeware, jogging past, forgetting I had slipped on the specs. They too vanished at some point.

The park lacks a formal "lost and found" but keys and other odd lost items show up on the little ledge at the bottom of the Park Rules sign. The sign consists of rough, redwood posts bolted together in rugged sturdiness. There I found a sign for lost puppies, and, over the years, have seen lost keys left there. Lost keys don't have any real value. You'd think someone would say, "Hey, I can go steal this guy's car!" But they don't. Who would want to steal a car anyway, and which car to steal? Questions, questions.

I do keep some things I found. I kept the dollar bill and it now drifts around in the clutter of my desk. Dog sticks and slobery tennis balls I do not keep. Other items you "find" don't really count: lunch leavings, cigarette butts, leaves, napkins, condoms, half chewed acorns, empty water bottles, coffee cups, styrofoam drink cups with straws, golf balls, feathers. Interesting feathers, leaves, drift wood, and so on I might keep while I'm walking, and then toss just before I leave the park. No sense in moving them, really. For every natural trinket I leave behind I'll find another one.

But I always look and I always find. The park offers everyone such a great opportunity to lose something. It's openness, the sense of "Ahhh...now I can let go!" It exacts a price. You hurry out into it, ready to play, you daydream in your car parked along the track, you marvel at your pet at full tilt after some ball you threw, you pull off your sweater or jacket and hurry to throw or catch. All these exciting moments of casting off, of dropping of cares leave their evidence for finders like me. I always look and I always find.

Wordless

Today, Sunday, I had the park pretty much to myself. The houses on my street as I walked to the park showed no lights except those faint, silent, inner room lights on, maybe night lights, but no bright rooms. I crossed Flint, quiet and deserted. I listened to the crunch of gravel on the track, the sparkle of frost on the leaves and pale yellow grass.

The temperature hovered somewhere in the 30s, about zero on the centigrade scale. To me it felt just cold. The breath of cold wind, the silent trees, the open swale, the hovering blue sky. Could I tell this cold from other colds? How frozen my thumbs felt; how numb my ears got. Yes, I could. Just like I can feel my joints and muscles and lungs. But I don't have words for them, or degrees, or images. Other pain, stiffness, shortness I can remember and so this day unfolds as yet another wordless day of feeling.

I did see one runner, a tall woman with white ear buds and a burgandy cotton shirt, dark pants and very needed ear warmers. I hadn't seen her before and I ignored her for the first round. She ran clockwise to my counterclockwise. The second time we passed I gave her a hand howdy and she said, "Hi." You never know about people. I make up my own stories about them. This one took time away from studies on a Sunday morning, or left someone sleeping, or acted on a resolution, or went out exploring, or needed some time alone, or fled in terror, or wanted to be seen in a stylish burgandy shirt. You never know. They approach and they leave without saying anything.

I do all the saying. And always to myself, but now with these words. "She's running too hard." "She likes the sun on her face." "She wouldn't fit in a small car." Whatever. The word stream starts, shaping the otherwise silent, unknown world of the park. The trees themselves--the large pecan grove, the willows, the firs, the elms, the honey locusts--all without labels except for what I provide. The bermuda, the crawling weeds, wet soughs, dips, vales, berms: all there for me to weave and name. Tick grass, goose weed, toad swamp, ant trough, sun slab, buffalo hump. The partial nature of nature: there but off to itself, quiet and wordless.

So what brings us all out to this park? Health, vanity, love, obsession? I have it to myself, even though I share it with others, this other runner in burgandy, here, okay, because she's house hunting and trying out the recreational possibilities of this neighborhood. I'd call that obsession.