Straight from the Parade in New York City

Elizabeth Zelvin

It's St. Patrick's Day in New York, and I jogged across the park in time to see the start of the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Here comes a marching band.

Then comes the Fighting 69th, an all-Irish regiment when they first gained fame in the Civil War, according to my husband the history buff.

I love the sound of the pipes and the way big men look so very fetching in their kilts.

I love to see women playing drums and tubas.

The crowd was enthusiastic.

But then disaster struck. We were lined up behind the barricades at Fifth Avenue just above 79th Street. The parade route was always up past the Metropolitan Museum and east on 86th Street. But for the last couple of years, it's been announced that it would only march to 79th--presumably as an economy measure. That would have been fine if they hadn't set up the barricades and allowed the first few contingents to march all the way past them. Suddenly, a host of police blocked off the route and directed the marchers to make the turn before they reached the hundreds of parade-goers lining Fifth Avenue above 79th.

All we saw of them was the horses' arses, as they probably say in Ireland, as they marched off to a chorus of disappointed boos from the crowd.

That was the end of the parade for us. But it's a glorious day in Central Park, with daffodils in full bloom, star magnolias (the early, fragrant ones) coming into their glory, and the pink magnolias around Cleopatra's Needle in bud.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone!

Running Alongside the Marathon

Elizabeth Zelvin

Last Sunday I watched on TV as Martin Lel of Kenya won the New York Marathon in 2 hours, 9 minutes, and 4 seconds. Then I tied on my battered sneakers, trotted out the door, and jogged down the block and into Central Park to join the race.

Actually, I finance the New York Marathon. Among the major sponsors for many years has been the Rudin Family. The Rudins are my landlord. I've been paying rent to them for forty years. They bestow it on the Marathon, take a tax loss (or so I assume), and get their picture in the paper as public benefactors. But it's my money.

Heading east across the park, I join the runners at the 24 mile marker, not far from the Metropolitan Museum. The marathoners use the road that loops around the park, roped off today, but the pedestrian path that runs alongside it, circuitously parallel, is navigable. By the time I get there, the course is packed with runners: men who have been running for three hours and will finish creditably in less than four, if my math is correct, and women who started half an hour earlier than the men. The excitement is infectious. The sidelines are packed with spectators holding homemade signs and banners. Pride, delight, and awe suffuse their faces as the runners stream by. Some groups wear matching T shirts proclaiming them the "scream team" or "posse" of their friend or family member in the race. They hoot, holler, and cheer for those they know and those they don't alike.

The crowd, both runners and those who cheer them on, is as diverse as ever in New York —and especially fun to see when it's a party, as this is. Every face is smiling. Every ethnic group and nation is represented. The signs and banners blazon encouragement to Bub and Mia and Yan and Kimi. I pick out a skinny guy in red from the river of runners and pick up my pace, trying to keep up with him, just to see if I can. I'm fresh—I haven't just run 24 ½ miles—so I manage it for 50 feet before I let him forge ahead and go back to my usual slow jog.

It's beautiful in Central Park, in spite of the gray sky and a temperature only in the 50s. It doesn't feel cold at all. The air is soft. Grass and weeping willows are still green in this unseasonably warm fall. Some of the lindens have a faint dusting of gold. A maple here and there offers shades of apricot and lemon. To my right as I pass the 25 mile marker, the Wollman Rink, where I learned to skate more than half a century ago, flashes a glimpse of gleaming polar white as a maintenance vehicle lumbers over the bright surface, smoothing the ice. The excitement swells as we near the south end of the park.

What elicits this desire to cheer for total strangers? Why do I have tears in my eyes? The sight of so many people each bent on achieving a personal best? The communal experience of this great city at play? Maybe it's partly that something as simple as running, accessible to all, can be raised to such a high art, such a unifying global moment. Sure, the Marathon, like any sports event, has its economic base and motivation. The winner gets $130,000, which the commentators I heard thought Lel would probably invest in his home town in Kenya, as he has past wins. But money's not what it's about. Not to the people who have turned out for it.

As I reluctantly turn west, then north, and head toward home, the mid-range finishers are beginning to pour out of the park to rendezvous with their friends and families, find someplace to rest their legs, maybe have a celebratory pizza and a beer. Each wears a medallion on a ribbon around his or her neck. They all look tired and very happy. As I cross Central Park West, two guys wrapped in mylar exchange a complicit grin with a guy wrapped in a red fleece blanket crossing the other way. They've done it!

The Mayor of Central Park

Elizabeth Zelvin

One of my favorite real life characters is Alberto Arroyo, a 91-year-old Puerto Rican American known to New Yorkers as the Mayor of Central Park. I didn’t know he was legendary and beloved when I first encountered him. I had recently started running around the Central Park reservoir for daily exercise. I run very, very slowly. A power walker can leave me in the dust. I’ve never succeeded in passing another runner, not even the octogenarian lady in the purple track suit I tried to catch up with for over a mile one time. So it was heartening when I began meeting the elderly gentleman who always greeted me as he passed. Each time he had a smile for me and a few words of encouragement.

Rain or shine, I’d see him making his way slowly along the track toward his favorite bench on the south side of the reservoir, unmistakable with his white hair, bushy white mustache, and cane. “Looking good!” he would call to me. Sometimes he would raise his face and both arms to the sky and say, “Beautiful day!” The first time I described him to someone who ran in the park, they said, “Oh, everybody knows him. That’s the Mayor of Central Park.” After that, I saw that many people, men and women of all ages, stopped to talk with him. He knew hundreds by name. “In my simple way,” he told me once, “I make a lot of people happy.”

After I got to know him, I heard Alberto’s stories. One woman stops by his bench periodically to give him a haircut. He is especially proud of his friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whom he courteously pretended not to recognize for years until the day she invited him to run with her. The stone Parks Department building near Alberto’s bench displays pictures and articles about him. Alberto came from Puerto Rico at the age of 21. Before settling in New York, he traveled in Europe, where the misery he saw prompted him to take a vow of poverty. He was the first person to use the path around the reservoir as a running track. From 1935 on, he ran there every single day. Only in the past few years have health problems kept him home now and then. I first introduced myself after writing a song about Alberto. He was delighted when I brought my guitar to the park and sang it for him. The very next day, I ran past him as he chatted with a couple of tourists. “That’s the woman who wrote a song about me,” I heard him say. I had become one of his stories.

Alberto uses a walker now. He gets to the park in early afternoon, and it sometimes takes him till after dark to get home. But he still makes his way around the track to his bench, which now bears a plaque honoring him. You can still occasionally see him standing on his head, a feat he used to perform daily. It still puts a big smile on my face to hear him call my name as I jog by. And sunshine or downpour or blizzard, he still says, “Beautiful day!”

Who's your favorite real life character?