The Long Boring Bedtime Story

You were born in Morningside Heights, not far away at all from the very first apartment your mommy and I lived in when we first moved to New York, at St. Luke’s Hospital, which is right by St. John’s Cathedral, and both of them are on the bluff that overlooks the Harlem Plain.

I fell in love with Morningside before we ever got there.  The name, of course, is wonderful.  But whatever website or book we learned about it in when we were studying up on the neighborhoods of Manhattan before we moved really made a good sell.  The namesake park, Columbia, Riverside Church.  Even though it was on the cusp of the very gritty (literally) west side of Harlem, it pretty much always felt like a safe community.  Lots of diversity.  The Dominican kids that helped us move in to our 5th floor walk-up on Broadway.  The Barnard and Columbia students.  The 24-hour Rite Aid.  Two libraries.  Twin Donut.  The elevated 1 train station.

But it was the park more than anything else that made Morningside so important to me.  Of course the wild in me wanted to find some wild in that City.  I expected picnic tables and a basketball court.  Those were there, but the were overshadowed by so much:  a high bluff that spilled in tiers with high roads and low roads, a rock wall with buttresses that held up Morningside Drive, a lake with a willow and a waterfall and waterfowl, a statue of Pan and a bear, and plants.

I love plants.  I study them and gather them and eat them.  I learned so many while I was there.  I found raspberries and violets and sassafras.  I gathered the raspberry leaves for your mom–to help with her menstrual flow–but I loved the taste of their tea myself.  The dried leaves have an almost banana-like quality in their fragrance, and a very soft brown flavor when brewed.

There was a rock that I loved to sit up on–well two actually.   They were good places to go and smoke a pipe and leave a prayer to the stones and hope for the best.  Dyadya Artur came to visit me there once, and we would get Twin Donut’s two donuts and coffee deal and go there and eat our breakfast and smoke our pipes.  That rock was by the dog run, overlooking the lake with its willow tree and its tiny little stand of cattails and the turtles and fish.  The other rock was closer to 123rd at the north end of the park.  It was easier to get to from our apartment, so I would usually go to that one if I had to run to the park at night to pray.  I happened by there one night, and I suddenly realized that it was the winter solstice, and I was so glad that I got to see the full moon through the bare mulberry limbs.

I think that the gods have been pushed back by civilization’s presence the same way that so many of the animals have disappeared.  It’s harder to hear them and be heard by them.  Concrete deafens prayers.  So does steel.  It’s like that Geordie MacDonald story about the shadows from the flames and how they were more real spirits than the shadows cast by gas light.

But once all this is gone, they’ll come back.  I’ll try to help you be there when it happens.  Maybe Dyadya Artur’s ancient shaman workout video will help us figure something out.  Or maybe the moon will show us through the willow limbs.

I hope I can take you to Morningside Park someday.  I think the raspberry canes have been torn apart and replaced with cultivated flowers.  But I bet you that there are still dandelions and violets and burdock in the lawns.

I never could dig up any of the sassafras roots there in that little stand of trees.  For one thing, it felt too exposed.  But for another, they were just getting started, and it seemed like they might have a good chance of making it.  So I would travel up to Inwood or the Bronx for my sassafras or Central Park.  There was a whole forest of sassafras in the Bronx up on the hill of plenty where the blackberries and sumac and dewberries grow.  There’s a graveyard on that hill too, and I always think of it when I read to you about the brown mother lizard who is basking by the old mossy gate because the drawing looks like the same kind of wrought iron work.  Does iron get mossy?

I bet I could have lived in that park if I’d had to.  So many forests.  And the stream and little lake.

Yeah, Van Courtland park was great.  So was Inwood Hill.  But Morningside was home.

You were born up on the Morningside
You were born up on that bluff so high
You were born under the dark Worm Moon
You were born when the moon was new

You were born where the raspberries grow
You were born by the burdock rows
You were born under the violet shade
You were born above the Harlem Plain

You were born by the waterfall
You were born and were loved by all
You were born by the willow tree
You were born into our family

You were born by the cattail stand
You were born on Lenape land
You were born where the mulberries fall
You were born where coyotes called

Goodnight, Munchkin.  Have some good dreams.