My Life in the Park

(Work in progress, soon to be a writing project)


My Life in the Park
My mother would always say to me, "The most wasted of all days are those without a laugh and happiness, so son crack a smile and make the day one worth it," her voice was dry and hoarse from days gone by of recreational drugs.
She was very much a hippie, much like a John Lennon character, a Neil Young fan, always a kind and soft woman. Nowadays she just sits at her antique spinning needle slowly puffing her father’s old pipe. It’s engraved with the cliché "carpe diem". I’m often reminiscent of this when I come to my spot. It’s a comforting image that has always stuck in my mind when thinking in the sun.

At this moment I’m sitting underneath an acorn tree, watching the clouds pass by. This park is my favourite place in the world. A nature preserve by the coast, to my left in the distance, tulip farms dance across the Tablecape horizon, red and yellow the most prominent. To my right, huge and mighty cliffs slightly curved from where the waves break. Where I sit the roses grow from within the black berries, much like how phoenixes fly from within the ashes. I sit here in the partial shade, with the warm and bright sun on my feet, plucking my guitar strings and humming a sweet melody. I know the lyrics but I am not the singer I earnestly wish I could be. I spend so long here sometimes that the people passing by on the footpath nearby think I’m homeless, they think I’m trying to busk or beg for change. I thank them for their generosity and kindness, as it’s a rarity, but I assure them I’m simply doing what I love and that’s enjoying the sun, scenery and those that also pass through here daily for one reason or the other.
There’s an aging skater boy, he’s come from the 70’s and looks like one of those kids in the film clip for ‘forever young’ by youth group. Now he’s old and balding but still cruises along the board walk, listening to an ancient walkman and remember his generation. Also my primary school PE teacher now runs a boot camp and takes his obese, middle-aged office workers for jogs along the causeway, every time I call out “having fun?” or “keep running slackers” to his sweaty, puffing mob as they galumph along the pavement and he gives me thumbs up and a grin. But mostly I’m here for you.


Every evening as the sun is going down; you walk past on your late afternoon stroll. Your long flowing, hazel hair, beautiful brown eyes and you have honestly the best smile I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to think that I dream of you so passionately yet to you I’m invisible. I’ll sit by the tree and hum my tune and you’ll just elegantly pass me by.
I’ll sit and jam for a little while longer, till just before dusk arrives and then journey home to a smoke filled house and knitted, tie-dyed shirts.

I did make something to try and sway you.

A small plaque half way up the tree I lean upon. It reads, “You’re as stunning as the afternoon sky lit red, gleaming with the radiance on the sun, but still with the beauty of the stars in your eyes,” – The guy with the guitar. When you first read it, you stopped and gawked, putting your hands over your mouth in astonishment. You blushed and giggled the rushed away. It made me smile and chuckle to myself, “One day you’ll stop and talk,” I say.
It’s for that smile and chuckle that I try to talk to you every day, because it’s as my mother always said, I don’t want to waste my day and you make the day one worth it.