It’s a feature of aging: grieving the loss of youthful physical abilities. We watch in sadness as all that leaping and cavorting we took for granted back in the day slowly fades away. For those of us with progressive neurological diseases, the grieving can be that much sharper, as the losses come earlier and faster than we had expected.

Fortunately, the things I’ve lost so far haven’t been all that dear to me. Take swimming: I never enjoyed it much as a youngster, mainly because I was a chubby kid, not fond of the ridicule that came with peeling off my shirt to cannonball into a pool or lake on a stifling southern Indiana afternoon. I recently discovered, while stepping off a paddleboard in Hawaii and sinking like a rock, that – thanks to PD – I’ve lost even my chubby-kid swimming skills. (Fortunately, this happened in relatively shallow water. I mean, who falls off a paddleboard and drowns in the hotel lagoon?) So, swimming is out, but I figure, hey – if something’s gotta go, it might as well be something I wasn’t too crazy about in the first place.

But enough about losses! Today’s theme is the celebration of things I can still do well, and in that spirit I will point out that I’m still a pretty good walker. Once I’m up and moving – after I’ve slo-mo enticed my feet into shoes, extricated myself from the couch, and wobbled to my feet – I can go for miles, especially if there’s something interesting to walk to.

And for me the most interesting destination of all is San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on a sunny day, now that the stretch of John F. Kennedy Drive that runs through the heart of the Park is vehicle-free. Out went the cars and trucks, in came the cyclists (bi-, tri-, uni-), baby strollers, rollerbladers, jugglers, dancers, toddlers on leashes, and exuberant exhibitionists. Golden Gate Park is a free-range Promised Land for people-watchers.

I spend at least three hours a week wandering the Park while Elisabeth takes an art class at the DeYoung Museum. Sometimes I cruise by the Conservatory of Flowers, sometimes I try to visit all ten of the Park’s lakes. And if I’m feeling particularly frisky, I hike on down to the Bison Paddock. (Yes, it’s really a thing.) But it’s the journey, not the destination, that makes for the best random sampling of Park people in their natural habitat. Here then, is a compilation of favorite observed/overheard moments from 2024 (s0 far):

• A 30-something dad, feeding his infant twins on park bench, one baby on each thigh, a bottle in each of his hands. I say, “Looks like you’ve really got your work cut out for you.” He tilts his head back, nods to me with his chin, says, “Mmph.” Looks like he’d like to say more, but he’s got a pacifier stuck in his mouth. I nod, wish him luck, and move on.

• I spot a woman holding her toddler horizontally in her arms. He’s face down, training pants at his ankles, peeing in the bushes by the side of the trail. Mom looks like she’s watering the greenery with him. When he’s done she shakes him a bit, making sure to get the last of the pee-drops onto the foliage, and says “You did it!” Kid says, “I do it!” about twenty times. Very excited. Mom pulls up his pants and off they go, “I do it! I do it!” echoing down the path.

• +/- 6-year-old boy, very angry in a pedal boat on Blue Heron Lake*, moving about 0.1 miles per hour. “Daaad!!” he yells, arms tightly crossed. “You said these boats would be faaast!” Dad, a tad flustered: “You want it to go faster, just pedal harder!” Kid: “That doesn’t work! We’re still too slow!!” Dad: “Hey, if the boat’s too slow for you, get out and walk!” Kid looks down, speaks up: “Daaad! That won’t work either! It’s just water!”

• I’m walking back to 14th Avenue to move our car so we don’t get a ticket. I pass a very sad looking young woman slumped on a park bench next to an expressionless elderly woman who may be her grandmother. “So, I said to him,” she says to the older woman, “‘Look, you’ve got to tell me what your intentions are here.’” She breaks down sobbing; the old woman, who appears to be alive, doesn’t so much as blink. I come back ten minutes later, and they’re still there: girl still crying, unblinking grandma not registering much of anything. “I mean, he’s just…no,” the young woman says, sniffling. “He’s just so…no.”

• I spy two mothers with toddlers off in a meadow. They’re not there together – they’re 50 feet or so apart – but their toddlers apparently have decided to throw simultaneous tantrums. They’re both screaming and choking and baby-swearing, faces down in the grass, pounding the ground. Mid-performance, one of the toddlers finally notices the other one, stops, sits up and watches, fascinated, maybe taking notes. His mother leans down, says something to him, and—Shazaam!— he realizes he isn’t quite done. Wailing again, he picks up where he left off. The mothers stare off in opposite directions, ignoring their little maniacs, waiting, waiting for the storm to pass. (There’s an old pediatric proverb about tantrums: “If you want the play to close down, stop buying tickets.“ This is clearly not the first tantrum rodeo for either of them.)

• Two tech-bros jogging by. Blonde-bro: “Didn’t there used to be a statue around here?” Redhead-bro: “Dude, this whole place is nothing but statues.”

• What’s the female equivalent of a tech-bro? “Tech-sis” doesn’t sound quite right, but at any rate, a woman on a bike, dressed to the nines in neon Italian bicycle ads, bears down on me while berating someone on her phone. I can hear her coming fifty yards away: “Vivisection!” she shouts. “No, vivisection!”she repeats even louder, staccato-spelling the word for the hapless assistant on the other end of the call. “It’s when you cut up something that’s alive, Jeff,” she snarls, whizzing by. (Advice to Jeff: Lock your front door tonight…)

• Over by the entrance to the Rose Garden, I come across a small boy playing a big saxophone. By my pediatrician’s estimate, he’s somewhere between an average-developing 10 year-old and a late-blooming “tween.” An older man – His father? A teacher? – sits in a camp chair some distance away, sipping from a thermos, calling out encouragement and suggestions. They have an easy working style – the boy finishes a chorus of “Strangers in the Night” (seriously) and looks to the man, who sends the boy a thumbs-up in return. “Nice one, buddy,” he calls, and they both smile. 

• One last JFK Drive sighting: All alone in the middle of the roadway, a young-ish man in a tight-fitting black body suit twirls and tosses a baton high overhead, the setting sun glinting strobe-like off the spinning shaft. His repertoire is quick and impressive: everything from horizontals and Figure 8s to cutbacks and flat flips and “three spins” with behind-the-back catches. Performing for everyone and for no one in particular, he neatly sums up the Day-in-the-Park vibe. (Full disclosure: I have no baton expertise. I just looked up “twirling tricks” on YouTube.)

That’s it for the Q1 2024 edition of “Mark Spies on People in the Park.” There are many parts of the Park I’ve yet to mine for people-watching purposes: the Tulip Gardens, the Windmills, the Japanese Tea Garden, the Beach Chalet, the Music Concourse with its 100+ year-old bandshell, the meadows, playgrounds, ballfields, etc., etc., ad infinitum. So, more to come, no doubt!

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