Speaker 1: For nearly ten years now, I have made a habit
Speaker 1: of wandering the city's Botanical Park every Tuesday and Saturday morning, rain, wind,
Speaker 1: the cold, lingering mists of early spring. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Retirement offers little in the way of external responsibility, and
Speaker 1: old cartographers like myself find solace in consistent roots. I
Speaker 1: never took up golf. I never found pleasure in bird watching,
Speaker 1: though I salute my more patient peers for their focus
Speaker 1: on feathers and calls. For me. The satisfaction comes from
Speaker 1: watching the silent logic of place, the subtle negotiations between
Speaker 1: sidewalks and roots, the way benches my grate imperceptibly closer
Speaker 1: to the sun each year, or so, it seems, at
Speaker 1: least it seemed that way until last month. I had
Speaker 1: reached a favorite section of the west Path, the air
Speaker 1: already perfumed by new leaves unfurling on the horn beams.
Speaker 1: The path follow a gentle decline to a looping bend
Speaker 1: beneath ancient catalpas trees, old enough that their bark's undulations
Speaker 1: remind me of recursive coastlines seen from thirty thousand feet.
Speaker 1: It's a RESTful place, set back from the more ornamental
Speaker 1: flower beds and school children's shrieks, with a clarity that
Speaker 1: appeals to those who prefer the logic of lines and
Speaker 1: visible sight lines. For decades, a clearing here has waited
Speaker 1: for its purpose, an empty balance of shade and openness that,
Speaker 1: in my years working with park plans, I once argued
Speaker 1: should hold a bench back. Then I'd sketch the proposal
Speaker 1: in thick black pencil on the master park overlay, even
Speaker 1: calculating the optimal angle to catch the sun during the
Speaker 1: brief glory of autumn afternoons. The committee rejected my suggestion,
Speaker 1: citing budget priorities. I remember the peculiar embarrassment of arguing
Speaker 1: for something so simple as a place to rest among trees.
Speaker 1: We bought benches for the rose garden and for the
Speaker 1: sheltered ourk, not for this unobtrusive bend. So when I
Speaker 1: saw the bench, a dignified arc of cast iron with
Speaker 1: wooden slats worn silvery by weather, occupying precisely the spot
Speaker 1: I had recommended, my steps quite literally faltered. The sight
Speaker 1: did not so much surprise me as offend the hidden
Speaker 1: geometry I've long internalized. Those who spend years handling blueprints
Speaker 1: and measuring tapes develop an almost physical sense for what
Speaker 1: ought to be present. The bench was not new. It
Speaker 1: was neither gleaming nor provisional, the kind that appears before
Speaker 1: summer concerts and vanishes. Lichens stippled the legs at the base,
Speaker 1: a drift of camphor leaves, curled in late season decay.
Speaker 1: The armrest's filigree had adopted the softened lines of a
Speaker 1: generation's worth of rain and freeze. Stuck to the seat
Speaker 1: was an abandoned yellow glove, the kind school children are
Speaker 1: forever misplacing. My impression resolved from confusion to intrigue as
Speaker 1: I approached there a fixed discreen to the right support
Speaker 1: was a brass dedication plaque reading in loving memory of
Speaker 1: Miriam Mimi Barlow nineteen hundred and twenty six, two thousand
Speaker 1: and eleven, for all who wander and rest, June seventeenth,
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen. Miriam Barlow not a name I recognized, though
Speaker 1: it is the timeless flavor of local philanthropists or community organizers.
Speaker 1: I ran a finger along the plaque, feeling the engraved letters,
Speaker 1: the oxidized margins where rainwater pooled this bench. If I
Speaker 1: were to believe the evidence before me had been here
Speaker 1: for nearly a decade. The date jolted me. It corresponded
Speaker 1: exactly to the period after my retirement, when I'd first
Speaker 1: begun my regular walks as a civilian, so to speak.
Speaker 1: Could I possibly have overlooked something so obvious and for
Speaker 1: so long? The notion made me uncomfortable, not frightened, but
Speaker 1: quietly unsettled. Any cartographer, even a retired one, relies on
Speaker 1: trust in the observed, on the expectation that the world's
Speaker 1: furniture holds steady. I circled the spot, looking for the
Speaker 1: telltale changes in earth and root around the bench's footings.
Speaker 1: The ground showed the churn of old seasons, but nothing
Speaker 1: that distinguished original installation from gradual decay. Everything about the
Speaker 1: bench's presence felt legitimate, except for my own recollection. To
Speaker 1: clarify the matter, I walked the short distance to the
Speaker 1: park's main entrance, where a new orientation map is posted
Speaker 1: behind glass on a weathered kiosk. The map reprinted within
Speaker 1: the last year, a fact I knew because my own
Speaker 1: old colleague, Harold, had volunteered his time updating their digital records.
Speaker 1: Neatly marked the locations of amenities for parents dog walkers
Speaker 1: and the wheelchair bound. Sure enough, a little icon sat
Speaker 1: where the west path curves under the Catalpas, labeled simply
Speaker 1: memorial bench. The map had no legend for who or
Speaker 1: why I stood in the gentle drizzle, cool breaths of
Speaker 1: wind drifting from the pond, weighing the evidence. Was this
Speaker 1: just the trick of imprecise memory, a slip in years,
Speaker 1: an artifact of my notoriously focused attention, Or was there
Speaker 1: another explanation for how a bench at once so precisely
Speaker 1: where I'd imagined it decades ago, could have been here
Speaker 1: all along without my notice. It was not fear, not really,
Speaker 1: that sent me wandering back through the loop that morning.
Speaker 1: It was curiosity, the kind that tingles in the finger tips,
Speaker 1: that little jolt when something does not quite match the
Speaker 1: logical map by which you orient your days. I resolved
Speaker 1: to remember every detail, to pay closer attention, and perhaps
Speaker 1: ask a few questions of those who would certainly know
Speaker 1: better than I whether anything at all was out of
Speaker 1: place in the park. Being the sort of person who
Speaker 1: prefers documentation, I began privately to keep a log. The
Speaker 1: Botanical Park sits at the rag edge of downtown caught
Speaker 1: between a row of Victorian houses and the canal that
Speaker 1: laces the city. To outsiders, the park appears deliberate, an
Speaker 1: organic quilt work of themed gardens sewn together over a century.
Speaker 1: To me, every intersection of path and every lopsided hill
Speaker 1: carries a trace of argument funds, balanced and unbalanced, passionate
Speaker 1: debates in cramped city offices, lines redrawn when a tree
Speaker 1: proved more persistent than a sidewalk crew. I have mapped
Speaker 1: the changes, not just in hours spent at a drawing table,
Speaker 1: but in field notes, photographs, layers of tracing vellum in
Speaker 1: my home office, annotated so minutely that only I would
Speaker 1: ever care to disentangle their meaning. Each week, I still
Speaker 1: bring a pocket sketch book, jotting down observations. No public
Speaker 1: record would note the slow encroachment of moss on the sundial,
Speaker 1: the sly fox that emerges for a two minute prowl
Speaker 1: in late October. Friends and park staff tease me for
Speaker 1: this habit, none more so than Marta, the garden in chief,
Speaker 1: who claims to remember not merely every perennial's genus, but
Speaker 1: the name of every child who ever squatted beside her flower.
Speaker 1: Beds and asked what made bees so busy? MARTA's reputation
Speaker 1: as an unofficial historian is only partly earned. She has
Speaker 1: a binder filled with laminated news clippings and nostalgic snap shots,
Speaker 1: but her real archive is conversational, a continual weaving together
Speaker 1: of who planted what and when, which owl was sighted last,
Speaker 1: and whether the bell shaped a beelia shrubs are truly
Speaker 1: best under the south fence or getting leggy this year. Alex,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, is the kind of groundskeeper any
Speaker 1: old city might claim to possess, but rarely does. Thirty
Speaker 1: three years in the park, unofficial mender of benches, fixer
Speaker 1: of fountains, combatant in the constant war against graffiti. His
Speaker 1: accent has grown milder over his years here, but his
Speaker 1: opinions are as sharp as his collection of old pruning shears.
Speaker 1: I see Alex at odd hours, pushing a wheelbarrow heavy
Speaker 1: with mulch, pausing to chat with pensioners or inspect the
Speaker 1: ancient plumbing. Then there are the Tuesday Walkers, a loosely
Speaker 1: attendant band of about a dozen locals, mostly in their
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties, who meet each week to wander a
Speaker 1: set root, share gossip, scold one another for aimless dawdling,
Speaker 1: and sometimes wrangle up a lunch at the cafe. Over
Speaker 1: the years, the composition of the group has shifted, but
Speaker 1: the name endures. They are something like living trail markers, cheerful,
Speaker 1: sometimes cantankerous, but each with a memory for the park's
Speaker 1: small social dramas. As for me, I have always felt
Speaker 1: a peculiar pride in the park's features. A few are
Speaker 1: quite literally my handiwork not in stone or steel, but
Speaker 1: in the fealty with which I built them into city records,
Speaker 1: fought for their funding, or scribbled persuasive notes into dull
Speaker 1: meeting agendas. Whenever I spot a design flourish that survives
Speaker 1: the decades, a serpent in path, a careful copse of larches,
Speaker 1: a secret bench, I feel a brief settisfaction, as if
Speaker 1: the world were waited ever so slightly toward order. The
Speaker 1: park's reputation for confusion is legendary among locals. If you
Speaker 1: need to think, neighbors say just walk until you're lost
Speaker 1: and start over. It's easy to lose one's bearings among
Speaker 1: the steeper landscape east of the Arboretum building, where hedgerows
Speaker 1: and curving paths slow. Even the most purposeful visitor. Marta
Speaker 1: calls it the maze that never repeats, and Alex complains
Speaker 1: bitterly about relocating bins and signage because nothing is where
Speaker 1: you left it ever. At home, I keep every map
Speaker 1: and record I was ever allowed to carry away or copy.
Speaker 1: Old blueprints in cardboard tubes, clippings from the city newsletter,
Speaker 1: digital scans, and faded microfilm prints from trips to the
Speaker 1: library's archives. My hand drawn notebooks fill a tall shelf.
Speaker 1: Some entries are mere sketches in colored pencil. Others are
Speaker 1: elaborate overlays, with distances triangulated and written evidence clipped in.
Speaker 1: I consult these maps more often than I tell people,
Speaker 1: sometimes to resolve a bet about a missing path, sometimes
Speaker 1: just to amuse myself with the slow work of remembering. All.
Speaker 1: This is to say, if there is any feature in
Speaker 1: this park I would have overlooked for a decade, I
Speaker 1: would be quite simply shocked. Having resolved to check the
Speaker 1: matter further. I planned my next visit around Alex's lunch break.
Speaker 1: There I found him elbow deep in a half barrel
Speaker 1: planter by the community greenhouse. His baseball caps, slouched back
Speaker 1: and knees muddy, humming contentedly, Alex, I called stepping carefully
Speaker 1: around a coil of hose. Got a minute for a
Speaker 1: stupid question. He wiped a grubby hand on his pants.
Speaker 1: Grin already apparent. Only if it's about the rose blight.
Speaker 1: I forgot. You're in charge of big mysteries. I let
Speaker 1: him tease me, then nodded toward the west Loop, the
Speaker 1: memorial bench beneath the catalpas. Do you remember when it
Speaker 1: was installed? He straightened, considering what Mimi's bench. Lord, it's
Speaker 1: been their ages now ten years. Easy. They did a dedication, Marier.
Speaker 1: Mimi's daughter brought cake. I think donated it herself. Had
Speaker 1: to get one of those foundations the park's trust to pay.
Speaker 1: But hell, it was a good spot, always shady, never
Speaker 1: gets too soggy. Why the direct answer defused my anxiety,
Speaker 1: but only partly. I pressed, you remember it actually being installed?
Speaker 1: The ceremony and all Alex looked at me like I'd
Speaker 1: asked whether water was wet. Of course I do. Some
Speaker 1: one left carnations all over it, Maria cried. I carried
Speaker 1: over the bag of concrete dug the holes myself. We
Speaker 1: had a fight about whether to move it two feet
Speaker 1: to catch the sunset, but Maria wanted it in that
Speaker 1: exact spot. You must have seen it that year, even
Speaker 1: weren't you still hunting for new benches. Then I shook
Speaker 1: my head. I remember talking about it that spot, but
Speaker 1: I don't recall any bench actually going In my project
Speaker 1: notes say funding fell through. He just shrugged with practice patience.
Speaker 1: Maybe you missed a memo, friend, Lots happens in this
Speaker 1: place when nobody's looking. Not quite reassured. I returned home
Speaker 1: and rifled through my own records. I have a digital
Speaker 1: trace of every significant proposal I worked on. Committee correspondents,
Speaker 1: scanned forms, even a faded Emil thread from the time
Speaker 1: when City Hall still used public addresses there. It was
Speaker 1: in my Park Amenities West Section two thousand and twelve
Speaker 1: two thousand and fourteen folder, a meticulously detailed funding request
Speaker 1: with my original sketch at the Catalpa Bend. The next
Speaker 1: few messages were sharp in tone, but routine budget will
Speaker 1: not allow additional bench at proposed location. In twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: suggest reevaluate for twenty sixteen cycle. My own reply, polite
Speaker 1: and perfunctory, declining to push further. No further mentions in
Speaker 1: any minutes, no MIMI, no successful campaign or donation. I
Speaker 1: flipped through my other records, photographs from summer walks, shots
Speaker 1: of autumn leaves trapped in puddles on the very path
Speaker 1: in question. In none of these images did the bench
Speaker 1: appear until last spring. Suddenly, in the background of a
Speaker 1: photo from March. There it was, modestly in frame, unmistakable.
Speaker 1: Had I simply never noticed it? Was it newly installed,
Speaker 1: or had it only just entered my awareness. The uncertainty
Speaker 1: made me impatient to confirm. I visited the city's public
Speaker 1: records portal from my home computer, searching the recent scanned brochures,
Speaker 1: those glossy, trifled printings handed out by the visitor center
Speaker 1: every spring. One from twenty eighteen described the Miriam Barlow
Speaker 1: Memorial Bench, installed twenty thirteen Westloop a favorite resting point
Speaker 1: for dedicated park goers. An even older copy from twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen meant the bench among the park's recent improvements. The
Speaker 1: evidence was absolute. It had been listed, mapped, and lauded
Speaker 1: as a part of the park for over a decade.
Speaker 1: I sat back in my stiff office chair, reviewing the
Speaker 1: proof all points agreed, the installation date, the dedication, the
Speaker 1: presence of the bench in brochures, and now even my
Speaker 1: own photographs dating back no further than last year. But
Speaker 1: clearly there everything save my own vivid recollection of that proposal,
Speaker 1: being quietly permanently shelved. For a full day, I set
Speaker 1: the matter aside, convinced it was no more than the
Speaker 1: vanity of an aging memory. But that certainty mine would
Speaker 1: not settle, and the curiosity only grew. It was during
Speaker 1: one of my restless walks, as Marta calls them, that
Speaker 1: the matter deepened. I took my usual eastward route, planning
Speaker 1: to loop back by the greenhouse and the small pond,
Speaker 1: then home past the Arboretum's tiled patio. I pried myself on,
Speaker 1: knowing every seasonal detour, every short cut that avoids the
Speaker 1: dampest patches come early May. Yet that morning, the root
Speaker 1: near the greenhouse seemed unfamiliar, not in any way so
Speaker 1: blatant as to alarm, but in the sort of detail
Speaker 1: that irritates the careful observer. A tang gravel path, which
Speaker 1: I recalled as arrow Strait for decades, now curved gently
Speaker 1: through a dense pocket of nulled beeches and hickories. Roots
Speaker 1: webbed imposingly across the soil. The trees, too, struck me
Speaker 1: as more established than seemed plausible. A thick canopy, high
Speaker 1: rooted and mossy, with the look of fifty plus year's growth.
Speaker 1: At the entrance was a modest placard the founders Grove
Speaker 1: planted nineteen fifty two, honoring the legacy of city visionaries.
Speaker 1: A cluster of faded family photos adorned the board, most
Speaker 1: shot in sepia or grainy color. According to the plaque,
Speaker 1: the path and grove had been perennial gathering spots for
Speaker 1: school groups, anniversary parties, and the cities famed midnight sonata
Speaker 1: summer concerts. My sense of familiarity faltered completely. Not with dread.
Speaker 1: I was too conscious of the sunlight slanting warmly through
Speaker 1: the leaves and the distant laughter around the water's edge,
Speaker 1: but with an odd investigative itch. My habit in such
Speaker 1: moments is to triangulate between physical evidence and the documented.
Speaker 1: I pulled out my phone to check the park's online map,
Speaker 1: the official city website only recently updated, as I had
Speaker 1: supplied historical notes for its content. There it was the
Speaker 1: curved path winding through a green blob labeled Founders Grove,
Speaker 1: traced in pale green. Even an old PDF brochure found
Speaker 1: via the city's archive pictured the winding course and ancient
Speaker 1: trees in faded color photographs, each supposedly at least as
Speaker 1: old as those depicted. I called Martyr, who was midway
Speaker 1: through scattering mulch over the flower border. Isn't it funny?
Speaker 1: I began? How the path by the greenhouse always seems
Speaker 1: to shift. I remember it being straight as a ruler,
Speaker 1: but now it curves through that old beech grove, Founders Grove,
Speaker 1: according to the plaque, Did I just lose the plot?
Speaker 1: Or did those trees really spring up overnight? Marta, beaming
Speaker 1: in her sun hat, barely paused before answering, Oh, Founders
Speaker 1: That groves older than both of us. My first fifth
Speaker 1: grade trip, we had cider there. Someone's grandpa played an
Speaker 1: accordion so loud the songbirds left. You mean the memorial
Speaker 1: stone been there as long as I can remember. Everyone
Speaker 1: loves the shade. Didn't you come to the kickoff picnic
Speaker 1: for Iris Week back in seventy eight that was under
Speaker 1: those very trees. You must have forgotten I shook my
Speaker 1: head oddly, I don't remember ever standing there before last month.
Speaker 1: She dusted off her hands, peering at me. Not unkindly,
Speaker 1: You need to take more breaks, darling. The park is
Speaker 1: older than we are. You spend too long in your
Speaker 1: own lines and squiggles, You'll miss the best bits, she waved,
Speaker 1: bustling off, while I noted the precise phrasing she'd used.
Speaker 1: Not just a claim of age, but memories anchored with
Speaker 1: specific events and details, all predating my supposed knowledge, none
Speaker 1: of which I recalled. Not satisfied, I trekked to the
Speaker 1: Tuesday walkers usual meeting point, the brick edged plaza near
Speaker 1: the main gates. I found three of their corps members,
Speaker 1: Edith brisk and sporting fluorescent trainers, mister Goldberg reading his
Speaker 1: battered copy of the newspaper, and Yvonne warming her hands
Speaker 1: on a thermos of coffee. Each greeted me warmly, more
Speaker 1: interested in dog gossip than questions of geography. But I pressed, anyway,
Speaker 1: do any of you remember Founders Grove always having that
Speaker 1: curved path. I thought it was added only recently, but
Speaker 1: the plaque says it's been there since the fifties. Edith snorted,
Speaker 1: gesturing with her walking stick. You must be going daft, dear.
Speaker 1: I have a birthday snapshot from sixty nine, right on
Speaker 1: that curve. Look. She fished her phone from a pocket
Speaker 1: and quickly navigated her photo's app, scrolling through a scan
Speaker 1: of an old square polaroid. Sure enough, a little troop
Speaker 1: of school children posed beneath the narled beeches, the path
Speaker 1: already snaking behind them. Even the picnic bench in the
Speaker 1: background seemed as it did now. I remember that summer,
Speaker 1: mister Goldberg said. We used to race around the curve
Speaker 1: during jim class. The rink would flood, every one shouting,
Speaker 1: slip on the roots. It's been like that since forever.
Speaker 1: What changes is the color of the mulch. That's it.
Speaker 1: Yvonne chimed in, I still have a sketch from an
Speaker 1: art class in high school. Maureen tried to draw the
Speaker 1: knotty roots. She was hopeless, but the curves there, and
Speaker 1: the oldest trees. A gentle laughter echoed among them, as
Speaker 1: if my confusion itself was the real oddity. I resolved
Speaker 1: reluctantly to investigate further at the library, feeling less like
Speaker 1: a careful observer and more like someone pursuing a phantom.
Speaker 1: I reserved time in the local history room, queuing up
Speaker 1: reels of microfiche and digging through clippings from the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies and before. The articles bore headlines like founders Grove
Speaker 1: host city centennial picnic, winding paths inspire poetry, contest, beech
Speaker 1: trees celebrate fifty years. There were faded group photos, invitations
Speaker 1: to picnics, and even a blurry shot of city officials
Speaker 1: cutting a ribbon beside the same angled path and ancient grove.
Speaker 1: The evidence was mountainous, not only physical, but testimonial, social,
Speaker 1: and photographic. Throughout my own memory of the grove as
Speaker 1: a recent fixture, the straight path, the young trees all
Speaker 1: seemed to have vanished, replaced by traces that every one
Speaker 1: else remembered and accepted. I left the archive with a sick,
Speaker 1: almost involuntary humility, as if the world had blinked around me.
Speaker 1: That evening, I sat at my desk reviewing the assembled evidence,
Speaker 1: city brochures, digital scans of old park guides, photos from
Speaker 1: both my own phone and those borrowed from others. I
Speaker 1: tried to convince myself this was no more than a
Speaker 1: case of selective memory. Perhaps I'd missed a landscaping project,
Speaker 1: misfiled meeting minutes, or let the years confuse what ought
Speaker 1: to have been simple. But memory, for all its loneliness,
Speaker 1: is not usually so easily overthrown by the sheer density
Speaker 1: of everyone else's recollection old habits die hard. I rifled
Speaker 1: through my notebooks of park mapping days. On a hunch,
Speaker 1: I decided to try something I'd only seen done in
Speaker 1: geology documentaries. I laid one of my hand drawn maps
Speaker 1: from a decade ago, the twenty twelve proposed sight lines
Speaker 1: and amenities overlay across a print out of last week's
Speaker 1: official park brochure and a current satellite image. The first
Speaker 1: obvious dissonance. None of the features precisely matched the linear
Speaker 1: path I remembered as straight was on all contemporary images,
Speaker 1: gently winding. The cluster of beaches in Founders Grove as
Speaker 1: now was absent on my diagram, replaced by a smaller
Speaker 1: copse drawn at a different angle. The memorial bench near
Speaker 1: the Catalpas appeared on the new map in the precise
Speaker 1: spot I once lobbied for, but not on my older
Speaker 1: field notes. My original was marked only with proposed bench rejected,
Speaker 1: not funded. I repeated the comparison a dozen ways, overlaying
Speaker 1: transparency sheets and digital maps, Squinting at Google earth Bing maps,
Speaker 1: an old city planning geese portal. None matched exactly. The paths, benches,
Speaker 1: and groves slid in ways so precise as to be
Speaker 1: almost measurable. Each deviation a few paces here, a single
Speaker 1: tree's displacement there. Even the more static features statues, hills,
Speaker 1: the duck pond showed discrepancies of feet, sometimes more on
Speaker 1: a walk. The next day I noticed a statue by
Speaker 1: the pond, a dull bronze heron on a granite plinth
Speaker 1: dedicated in honor of Franklin s. Zella, Benefactor of Youth
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six Zella. I racked my memory for any
Speaker 1: mention of this man, whose name rang no Bell. My
Speaker 1: knowledge of city donors had once bordered on encyclopedic. The
Speaker 1: statue looked unmoved by time or climate. I snapped a
Speaker 1: few pictures, and back at home, loaded a search for
Speaker 1: Franklin s. Zella in the city newspaper database. There it
Speaker 1: was a grainy scan from two thousand three, showing the
Speaker 1: unveiling ceremony at the very pond with the mare and
Speaker 1: several children gathered round. The photo matched the angle of
Speaker 1: the statue's current setting the trees and water in the background.
Speaker 1: I found myself momentarily angry. I must have attended that event,
Speaker 1: or at least read about it. Yet my notes from
Speaker 1: two thousand three made no mention of Zella or of
Speaker 1: a statue dedication. In growing confusion, I called Harold, my
Speaker 1: former project partner, who still managed the city's archives. He
Speaker 1: answered on the second ring, his voice brusque. How can
Speaker 1: I help out to day? He asked, Harold, do you
Speaker 1: recall Zella's statue by the pond? The heron, he chuckled.
Speaker 1: Good Old Frankie z Guy was a local legend, used
Speaker 1: to run the youth chess club, did a lot for
Speaker 1: the park after his wife died. Was at the dedication myself.
Speaker 1: You pulled some diagrams for event planning, I remember, I frowned.
Speaker 1: You have those. I can't find a single record under
Speaker 1: my name. I can send over the scans. You definitely
Speaker 1: drew up the site plan, the dated ninety six and two.
Speaker 1: Want the p d f's. Within minutes his email arrived,
Speaker 1: I opened the attachments and sure enough, stamped diagrams bearing
Speaker 1: my handwriting, the statue plotted where it sits, now dates
Speaker 1: and signatures perfectly matching the public. I checked my own files.
Speaker 1: My personal paper drafts for two thousand and two had
Speaker 1: no such feature, only some notes about future sculpture pending funding.
Speaker 1: Frustration set in sharp and bright. It was no longer
Speaker 1: a matter of forgetting two parallel accounts. Mine and everyone
Speaker 1: else's were now competing, not just for attention but for
Speaker 1: factual primacy. If it was only my aging brain inventing fables,
Speaker 1: why would the diagrams, evidence, and photos from others diverge
Speaker 1: so systematically from my own. Harold over the phone remained patient,
Speaker 1: but ultimately confused. Look, old friend, We've all had our
Speaker 1: senior moments. Paper trails are never perfect. Maybe you filed
Speaker 1: the drafts under the wrong year. Happens to the best
Speaker 1: of us. But the evidence had become too clear to
Speaker 1: brush off. The park has now witnessed not just by eyes,
Speaker 1: but by documents, photos, emails, and maps possessed features contradicted
Speaker 1: by my life long, stubborn memory. The bench grove statue,
Speaker 1: even the gentle slope of one hill. My recollections were
Speaker 1: now the only ones that did not belong, and not
Speaker 1: even my evidence could withstand the overlays of everyone else's world.
Speaker 1: I pressed further into my home offices, arsenal of old
Speaker 1: and new, with transparent sheets, digital overlays, and my battered
Speaker 1: scale rulers. I treated the park's geography as if it
Speaker 1: were a living puzzle. What first appeared to be in
Speaker 1: consequential drift paths dulled by decades, sight lanes imperceptibly askew,
Speaker 1: now suggested something more precise. For every feature that felt impossible,
Speaker 1: The corresponding artifact from others, martyrs sketches, Alex's sight logs,
Speaker 1: snap shotted group photos from the walkers, Harold's diagrams, corroborated
Speaker 1: the present, not my past. It occurred to me in
Speaker 1: a flash, both thrilling and frustrating that the problem was
Speaker 1: not just a collision of subjective memory and fact. The
Speaker 1: duography of the park itself, its lines, its coordinates, its
Speaker 1: amenities were layered in a way that did not add up,
Speaker 1: not merely confusion, but a convergently impossible geometry. The elements
Speaker 1: had shifted, slid, and relocated in a manner that almost
Speaker 1: suggested arithmetic, as if every shifted feature was counterbalanced by
Speaker 1: another elsewhere in the park. I widened the experiment, Calling
Speaker 1: Martyr again, I asked if she had scrapbook photos of
Speaker 1: the pond area from last year and a decade ago.
Speaker 1: She cheerfully obliged, emailing scans of picnic shots, both old
Speaker 1: and new. The heir and statue stood in every one,
Speaker 1: flanked by trees whose roots I recalled as bare saplings
Speaker 1: only five years prior. A Tuesday walker shown laughing beside
Speaker 1: the monument, swore the image was from the famous sandwich
Speaker 1: incident of nine and yet I recalled attending that event,
Speaker 1: no statue, only a stretch of grass. The more evidence
Speaker 1: I gathered, the clearer the pattern became. Every inexplicable feature
Speaker 1: in the park. Every shifted bench, ancient grove, out of
Speaker 1: place statue came with its own scaffolding of memory, documentation,
Speaker 1: and testimony. In each case, someone I knew, and the
Speaker 1: public record provided air tight support for the current truth,
Speaker 1: even as my own deeply held experience testified otherwise. At last,
Speaker 1: after a week of feverish inquiry, the realization hit me
Speaker 1: as strange and quiet as the creek's rustle on a
Speaker 1: windless day. This was not merely a struggle of memory.
Speaker 1: Something in the interplay of people, records, and place itself
Speaker 1: was redrawing the lines. The evidence was not simply missing.
Speaker 1: It had rearranged itself, as if to preserve two, three,
Speaker 1: or a dozen coexisting histories, each ready to be resurrected
Speaker 1: by a well remembered story or a single photograph. No,
Speaker 1: this was no fault in my own mind, nor in
Speaker 1: the materials of city government or the memories of fellow walkers.
Speaker 1: The very geograph of the park as it was and
Speaker 1: as it is was bent by the weight of its
Speaker 1: own recollections, locked in by artifacts as much as memories.
Speaker 1: With this, curiosity turned sharper clearer. If the park's lines
Speaker 1: could so easily change shape, woven by consensus or by
Speaker 1: unseen hands, what else weighted in the earth and paths
Speaker 1: to be discovered, measured or lost? The overlays creaked softly
Speaker 1: as I handled them, transparent sheets atop archival paper, a
Speaker 1: tangle of lines and pigments that only I could properly read.
Speaker 1: There was solace in this tactile ritual, a comfort I
Speaker 1: cherished since my days hunched over municipal blueprints. But for
Speaker 1: the first time, my hands betrayed more agitation than precision fingers,
Speaker 1: skating from bench icons to the unlikely knot of the
Speaker 1: founders grove, searching for some invariant. I decided that if
Speaker 1: this was to be understood, it needed to be mapped systematically,
Speaker 1: like a surveyor, not a baffled witness. I cleared every
Speaker 1: project off my long desk. Outwent the stacks of annotated
Speaker 1: park news letters. Outwent unfiled seed catalogs, even the tin
Speaker 1: for paper clips. I taped off a grid, the sort
Speaker 1: of transformation that had in years past made city officials
Speaker 1: si at my eccentricities. I printed current maps from the web,
Speaker 1: the cities, the gardening club s, even side by side
Speaker 1: outputs from the big map platforms. Printed satellite images, all
Speaker 1: dated within the last twelvemonths, sat beside the scans of
Speaker 1: highest resolution I could pry loose from the archives. My
Speaker 1: first aim distances. If memory and artifact both fail, a
Speaker 1: tape measure seldom lies, or so I always insisted. I
Speaker 1: returned to the park armed with a sturdy surveyor's tool,
Speaker 1: and measured from the main entrance archway to Miriam Barlow's
Speaker 1: memorial bench sixty one paces along the marked path. Both
Speaker 1: new maps and the city's records insisted it should be
Speaker 1: fifty four. The bench lined up precisely with the catalpas,
Speaker 1: their draping branches still thick with lime citrus scent, whereas
Speaker 1: my own historical sketches had the chosen sight several feet
Speaker 1: east toward the drainage runnel, yet in the soil beneath
Speaker 1: the bench, no clear evidence suggested it had ever been moved.
Speaker 1: I measured again, this time between the statue by the
Speaker 1: pond and the corner where the Tuesday walkers always begin
Speaker 1: their route. Contemporary records gave a figure seven meters shorter
Speaker 1: than my old notations. I could not trust a satellite's
Speaker 1: estimate for their angles, but the variance were so consistent
Speaker 1: and so elegantly distributed around major features that I began
Speaker 1: to suspect some rulefulness to this chaos. There were no
Speaker 1: wild leaps, no bench in the duck pond, no path
Speaker 1: ending in a hedge, only small geometric tremors, subtle but irrevocable.
Speaker 1: Back home, I physically traced every major structure. I could
Speaker 1: recall statue, bench, entrance hill on separate transparencies. When stacked
Speaker 1: the overlays formed odd, fuzzy shadows, intersections where certainty seemed
Speaker 1: to dissolve, lines refusing to coincide. The old city maps
Speaker 1: disagreed not only with my sketches, but with each other,
Speaker 1: even within a given year. The Gardener's Association map, printed
Speaker 1: in glossy folds in twenty nineteen, rendered paths in gentle
Speaker 1: arcs entirely missing from both city and private firm maps
Speaker 1: just months earlier. Even their page legends clashed west Ridge
Speaker 1: Path original on one pond, Crest Path realignment nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: two on another, the same segment. Trying to make sense
Speaker 1: of it, I realized these discrepancies had always existed. What
Speaker 1: changed was my sensitivity to them, and crucially, my inability
Speaker 1: to find one definitive record. Every attempt to line up
Speaker 1: two snap shots, two official sources, two park sketches, even
Speaker 1: satellite shots supposedly free from human error, resulted in minute
Speaker 1: but palpable contradiction. On a whim, I mapped the disagreement
Speaker 1: for each major feature. I shaded the area of maximum
Speaker 1: variance between all sources, turning my living room wall into
Speaker 1: a heat map. The areas of highest chaos congregated precisely
Speaker 1: around the bench, Founder's Grove and the Heron Statue, each
Speaker 1: site of my most persistent cognitive dissonance. It was as
Speaker 1: if the park's physical heart pulsed with overlapping layers, the
Speaker 1: ground beneath each site swollen with rival versions of itself.
Speaker 1: I needed a counterbalance another cartographer's perspective. My timing was fortuitous.
Speaker 1: A visiting landscape architect, a cheerful woman named Lynn, was
Speaker 1: presenting a children's garden proposal at city Hall. Over coffee,
Speaker 1: I casually asked how long she'd known the park. My
Speaker 1: office did the plans for the Kid's Loop two thousand
Speaker 1: and fifteen, right after the old willow finally fell down.
Speaker 1: That twisty path near the sand pit that was us
Speaker 1: had been there since the seventies, really just needed repaving.
Speaker 1: I raised an eyebrow. You're sure I thought that root
Speaker 1: was added five or six years ago, Lynn laughed, No,
Speaker 1: it was always there, at least since I interned, and
Speaker 1: the original plans are in our office safe my mentor
Speaker 1: drew up the layout. Funny though, I walked that path
Speaker 1: the other day and the curve seemed softer. But I
Speaker 1: checked my old file photos. Still curvy as ever, she
Speaker 1: offered to email me a scan. Her drawing, elegant on
Speaker 1: thick vellum, showed the path nearly identical to its current
Speaker 1: meandering form. Yet my sketch books from the same period,
Speaker 1: retrieved in haste from home, depicted a straight gravel short cut.
Speaker 1: Both carried official project stamps. It dawned on me that
Speaker 1: the variation was not a quirk of recall or poor survey.
Speaker 1: Now each map from each author justified it its own
Speaker 1: history with documentary rigor, even as all mismatched. Here was
Speaker 1: an objective world colliding with a chorus of smaller, undeniable truths.
Speaker 1: I contacted the Tuesday Walkers by group email, explaining gently
Speaker 1: that I'd like to borrow any park photos from the
Speaker 1: last fifteen years. Replies arrived in a torrent digitized albums
Speaker 1: of picnics, charity fun runs, costume parties amid the rhododendrons.
Speaker 1: Every photo placed the questioned features firmly within each moment,
Speaker 1: the hero and statue as backdrop. For a nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: seven Easter egg hunt, the curved path through Founders Grove,
Speaker 1: hosting processions of children none had seen in an age.
Speaker 1: The memorial bench already weathered by the time any one
Speaker 1: remembered sitting on it. I needed to see if any
Speaker 1: one else's evidence shared my confusion. Martyr, of course stood ready.
Speaker 1: Bring every one and their maps. She said, we'll have lunch,
Speaker 1: a real war of worlds. I gathered Alex, still skeptical
Speaker 1: but good natured Harold, bringing rolls of diagrams and thinking
Speaker 1: a fresh angle might help. Doctor Singh, a historian from
Speaker 1: the college. We commandeered a meeting room at the visitor center.
Speaker 1: Martyr arrayed the tables with home made snacks and nod
Speaker 1: I think to the walkers traditions. Each of us laid
Speaker 1: out our own artifacts, careful not to mix sets, photos, diagrams,
Speaker 1: annotated pamphlets, handwritten notes. At first, the atmosphere was cheerful,
Speaker 1: even conspiratorial. Soon though, it dissolved into cross examination. Here's
Speaker 1: the bench in twenty ten, Martyr insisted, pointing at a
Speaker 1: faded photo, there's the catalpas. You can see the old
Speaker 1: compost barrel behind. See the bench was always there. Harold
Speaker 1: unfolded a surveyor's plot with my signature. The statue's location
Speaker 1: matches this layout two thousand two, but your version, he
Speaker 1: pointed meaningfully at me, has it over by the playground,
Speaker 1: And here's doctor Singh's map. Yet another spot, Alex leafed
Speaker 1: through a maintenance log. We replaced that bench in fifteen.
Speaker 1: I did it myself. Can't argue with notes in my
Speaker 1: own handwriting. Doctor Singh, thoughtful as always, watched the exchange
Speaker 1: before offering his perspective. What's remarkable here isn't the memory.
Speaker 1: Everyone expects that to shift. It's the physical evidence. We
Speaker 1: each hold proof that contradicts the others. Photos, blueprints, logs
Speaker 1: written by our own hands. He held up a photocopy
Speaker 1: of a nineteen eighties city map. Place. Memory is usually
Speaker 1: governed by consensus, but here consensus doesn't collapse disagreement. Each
Speaker 1: reality seems to have its own legal documents. There was
Speaker 1: laughter uneasy this time Martyr attempted to lighten the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Just like the fable of the wandering bridge. Every old
Speaker 1: village claims the bridge moved on its own after a
Speaker 1: bad flood. Maybe parks are like that. I tried to
Speaker 1: reason through the problem aloud. These aren't stories. We have artifacts.
Speaker 1: My survey notes say one thing, Harold's copies say another.
Speaker 1: Yet they're both official. Both with our signatures, Doctor Singh
Speaker 1: smiled gently. Historians call it the drift of anchors. Find
Speaker 1: enough accounts of one place, you'll spot contradictions in maps, records,
Speaker 1: even court documents. I have a file on a neighborhood
Speaker 1: whose boundaries changed with every mayoral campaign. Yet every boundary
Speaker 1: has deeds and addresses to support it. The groups evayed
Speaker 1: the stacks, maps, overlapping and diverging, a confusion of lines
Speaker 1: and lived experience. In a moment both playful and slightly unnerving,
Speaker 1: Doctor Singh proposed a small test. Pick up a document
Speaker 1: you know to be yours, tell us where the Heron's
Speaker 1: statue is placed. We did so, passing around our personal artifacts.
Speaker 1: When I held my own Diye diagram, the statue's position
Speaker 1: seemed irrefutable, pond's edge due west. When Harold took it,
Speaker 1: his gaze narrowed. That's strange, this matches my memory. Now
Speaker 1: did you switch drawings? We repeated the experiment, each person
Speaker 1: handling the artifacts. Subtly, the features in the diagrams settled
Speaker 1: into whatever configuration best matched the holder's account. Not total revision,
Speaker 1: but a faint realignment enough to spark conspiracy theories. In
Speaker 1: a less disciplined company. Here it simply left us blinking
Speaker 1: at each other in bemused disbelief. It was martyr observing
Speaker 1: our exchanged blueprints who giggled and declared, It's like the
Speaker 1: park is being mapped and unmapped at the same time.
Speaker 1: We're chasing what we already think we know. Doctor Singh nodded.
Speaker 1: That may not be just a joke. In some cultures,
Speaker 1: there are stories of memory spaces, places whose reality is
Speaker 1: shaped by the stories most often told, or the collective
Speaker 1: imagination of those who returned to them. Urban scholars call
Speaker 1: this the mythology of habitas, and some field anthropologists have
Speaker 1: documented literal space street plans, boundary walls that fluctuate between generations,
Speaker 1: not just in memory, but in records and paintings, sometimes
Speaker 1: even in land deeds. Reality by committee, so to speak.
Speaker 1: He outlined several cases, an English town whose church seemed
Speaker 1: to migrate in medieval paintings depending on the decade. An
Speaker 1: indigenous settlement where sacred groves changed names, locations, and associated
Speaker 1: myths from elder to elder, but always with a collective confidence.
Speaker 1: Each generation insists on its map, doctor Singh mused, and
Speaker 1: sometimes the world itself bends to absorb it. I could
Speaker 1: not help but see a resonance with our own case,
Speaker 1: though our evidence was harder. It was photographic, not mythic.
Speaker 1: But here I protested, the park boasts not just stories,
Speaker 1: but artifacts, benches, statues, blueprints, photographs, all supporting the current arrangement.
Speaker 1: The artifacts are part of the memory ecology, Doctor Singh suggested,
Speaker 1: grinning at the conceit. They arise with consensus. When enough
Speaker 1: people believe or need a past, the world supplies it,
Speaker 1: or perhaps the evidence emerges to fit. It struck me
Speaker 1: that the park, with its intertwined generations, was an ideal
Speaker 1: Petri dish for this hypothesis. Features were desired, debated, denied,
Speaker 1: lobbied for, sometimes lost, often reimagined. It was more than
Speaker 1: the shifting of a border or the softening of a path.
Speaker 1: It seemed to be a process by which geography itself
Speaker 1: was collectively rewritten, with memory not merely a trace, but
Speaker 1: a causative force. The meeting adjourned in uncertain amusement, with
Speaker 1: everyone agreeing to agree to disagree. Though I lingered with
Speaker 1: doctor Singh as he gathered his notes, I pressed him
Speaker 1: for further speculation. Could memory shape the Earth so fully,
Speaker 1: even against tangible records. He produced a folded chart from
Speaker 1: an expanding folder. Look at the park's name even on
Speaker 1: this timeline ce Royal Botanical Park, then City Arboretum, then
Speaker 1: simply the Gardens in the eighties, and back to Botanical
Speaker 1: Park after the millennium grant. The city only changed the
Speaker 1: signage after people began calling it by the new name.
Speaker 1: It's a story of slow accretion landscape as palimpsest. I
Speaker 1: tested this by checking old newsletters. Sure enough, even official
Speaker 1: documents referred to the park by whichever name the community adopted.
Speaker 1: It was as if the real name lagged until lived
Speaker 1: consensus accumulated another layer of evidence, bending to repetition. For
Speaker 1: the rest of the day, my mind circled doctor Singh's
Speaker 1: memory reservoir theory, equal parts skeptical and enthralled. What if
Speaker 1: the park's many committees, gardeners, and donors had, over decades
Speaker 1: impressed their wishes so deeply that new features materialized precisely
Speaker 1: along those communal expectations, memory retrofitting reality again and again
Speaker 1: until all layers blurred. Perhaps my own certainty bread of
Speaker 1: a career staking claims on the physical had blinded me
Speaker 1: to the park's deeper logic, that of belonging, repetition and desire.
Speaker 1: The answer I felt was incomplete. Knowing the theory did
Speaker 1: not explain the mechanics. Was this collective psychology a peculiar
Speaker 1: local artifact of bureaucracy and amateur record keeping, or something stranger,
Speaker 1: a communal willpower thick enough to bind not just recollections
Speaker 1: but matter itself. To test the boundaries, I proposed an
Speaker 1: experiment to Martyr. A gardener's hand, after all, is about
Speaker 1: as close to the ground as one can get. She
Speaker 1: agreed to help. Eager for mischief and science alike, we
Speaker 1: arranged for a new fern, a rare and spidery species
Speaker 1: known for its impossible delicacy, to be potted and placed
Speaker 1: by the main path in a subtle clearing near the
Speaker 1: sensory garden. On installation day, I snapped a photograph the
Speaker 1: new plant, the modern stainless plaque I had inscribed with
Speaker 1: donated by l M April twenty twenty four below. I
Speaker 1: emailed the photo to Alex and Harold and asked the
Speaker 1: Tuesday walkers to take a group photo beside the fern
Speaker 1: during their planned stroll. After one week, I returned, my
Speaker 1: heart pounding with more anticipation than seemed dignified for a
Speaker 1: person my age. The fern was thriving, perky, despite the
Speaker 1: brooding sky. The plaque marking its provenance was still there,
Speaker 1: but rather than the modern museum style I had installed,
Speaker 1: it looked older, tarnished, engraved in a script eyed stopped
Speaker 1: using some years ago. The text read rare fern donated
Speaker 1: by friends twenty fourteen. I blinked, pulled out my phone
Speaker 1: and checked the installation photo. There was the plaque, sleek, sharp,
Speaker 1: unmistakably modern. Confused, I called Martyr, who was watering the
Speaker 1: near by azaleas. Oh, I remember that patch, She said.
Speaker 1: We moved the iris bed to make room back in
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. Glad the fern s finally getting recognition. I
Speaker 1: put it in my note book, wont to see. She
Speaker 1: produced a worn sketch book. On a page dated twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: right around my retirement, was a hasty ink drawing of
Speaker 1: the clearing that exact fern, labeled alongside the date you forgot,
Speaker 1: She teased, that's the year you pitched the idea. Anxiously,
Speaker 1: I opened my emil The Tuesday Walkers group photo arrived
Speaker 1: in it. The group arranged themselves around the fern, but
Speaker 1: the plaque appeared not as the one I'd placed, but
Speaker 1: as a squared off ceramic marker, the sort used in
Speaker 1: commemorations more than a decade ago. No one reacted as
Speaker 1: though this was odd. It appeared unremarkable to all but me.
Speaker 1: I sent my original photo to Harold, who replied, curious thing,
Speaker 1: The plaque in your shot is the same as the
Speaker 1: one I remember. Just wish you'd had that model made
Speaker 1: back in fourteen. It's better than the one we used. Then,
Speaker 1: each account, each artifact seemed to snap into the prevailing
Speaker 1: memory of whoever focused most intently. Even my physical act
Speaker 1: of documenting was absorbed not simply into some future revision,
Speaker 1: but as if it had always been so. The experiment's
Speaker 1: result was not to clarify the matter, but to confirm
Speaker 1: that certainty was a shifting threshold. Martyr was not lying,
Speaker 1: nor were the walkers, nor was I. Our documentation accumulated
Speaker 1: like silt shifting channels, patterns visible only in retrospect, a
Speaker 1: measure of humility crept in. Perhaps evidence in the park
Speaker 1: is not a fixed ledger, but a score performed differently
Speaker 1: by each player every recital, reshaping the sheet music. After
Speaker 1: several late evenings at my map strewn desk, I decided
Speaker 1: to stop searching for a single true version and instead
Speaker 1: looked for patterns in the way's features appeared and reappeared,
Speaker 1: always in line with communal expectation. Each feature, it seemed,
Speaker 1: gained reality in the moment enough people remembered, valued or
Speaker 1: sighted it, often after dispute or desire, occasionally after neglect.
Speaker 1: I sat one afternoon on the impossible bench, the bench
Speaker 1: that should not exist, at least not on any page
Speaker 1: I trust and watched sunlight move like liquid through the
Speaker 1: green canopy. Families and ritarees wandered past, each using the
Speaker 1: space without hesitation, confidence, unspoiled by any inkling of debate.
Speaker 1: I looked for signs that others perceived these layers. A
Speaker 1: woman stopped near by with her spaniel squinted and remarked, funny,
Speaker 1: I could swear that path used to run on the
Speaker 1: other side must be mistaken. I smiled and caught myself answering.
Speaker 1: Or maybe you remember a different visit. She grinned, nodded,
Speaker 1: moved on, walking across the park's heart, watching the dog
Speaker 1: legs in the paths, the crowd at the Tuesday market,
Speaker 1: the raucous shrieks of school children cutting across my old
Speaker 1: survey lines. I felt profound gentleness toward this moving, uncertain ground.
Speaker 1: I wondered, not with frustration, but with a peculiar hope,
Speaker 1: whether the park might be the most honest place I know,
Speaker 1: every bench dreamed into place, every statue debated, every grove
Speaker 1: of trees thickened by use or myth, each simultaneously true,
Speaker 1: as far as those willing to care enough to remember.
Speaker 1: My next port of call was doctor Singh's office, tucked
Speaker 1: away in the History faculty's strikingly modern wing. I presented
Speaker 1: him with my findings, patterned overlays, contradicting survey records, even
Speaker 1: the results of our fern experiment. He listened intently, then,
Speaker 1: with a conspiratorial smile, produced a stack of art postcards. Look.
Speaker 1: He said, this is Portsmouths Cathedral Square in eighteen ninety,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty two, nineteen fifty and nineteen seventy seven. Its
Speaker 1: central monument changes position in every depiction west south east.
Speaker 1: But if you check the city books, each date's guides
Speaker 1: and maps agree with the painting being accurate for its era.
Speaker 1: He offered further analogies quantum superposition. Light passes through both
Speaker 1: slits collapses only when you measure. The park is a
Speaker 1: living history, its features stabilized by collective attention. Sometimes a
Speaker 1: legend makes something so vivid that even the archives scramble
Speaker 1: to keep up. The park is lesser place than an
Speaker 1: ongoing act. I tried to speak, but hesitated, the words
Speaker 1: coming slower. Now, so, doctor singh, you mean there never
Speaker 1: was one original park. Every version, every map, artifact, and
Speaker 1: memory seeds are kind of co ordinate, anchored each time
Speaker 1: some one truly sees or recalls it. He leaned back, You,
Speaker 1: of all people should appreciate a map is an argument,
Speaker 1: an act of will you draw a bench on paper?
Speaker 1: If enough people expect it, fight for it, return to
Speaker 1: the memory of it, perhaps the bench becomes inevitable, even
Speaker 1: retroactively real. The logic, once alien began to clarify, not
Speaker 1: as a tidy solution, but as a way for me
Speaker 1: to live alongside the contradictions. My own career, so bent
Speaker 1: on precise lines, had perhaps missed the truth that place
Speaker 1: is always contested, not just administratively or ceremonially, but in
Speaker 1: the fibers of individual and shared memory. The park, more
Speaker 1: than any other place, was not simply terrain, but aggregated desire.
Speaker 1: Its real boundaries lay wherever they were wanted, mapped or told.
Speaker 1: As I walked home that afternoon, a final discovery awaited
Speaker 1: At the back of my map cabinet. Wedged behind a
Speaker 1: file of grant rejections and sight plans was a thin
Speaker 1: folder marked all Turnip maps. I did not remember ever
Speaker 1: titling such a collection. Inside I found a set of
Speaker 1: rough but intensely detailed park layouts, each sketched unmistakably in
Speaker 1: my own hand. The dates ranged from my earliest years
Speaker 1: on the project through the early twenty tens, but the paths, benches,
Speaker 1: and groves in these sketches differed subtly from both my
Speaker 1: official memory and the city s. Some features, like the
Speaker 1: Herons Statue, occupied places I never recalled drawing them, and
Speaker 1: every map was carefully initialed in my customary script. Each
Speaker 1: layout bore notations rejected but may be inevitable or alternate sightline.
Speaker 1: Ask Martyr as if in some earlier forgotten season, I
Speaker 1: had already suspected the park's peculiar multiplicity. It was not
Speaker 1: a tidy answer. It was a release of sorts. If
Speaker 1: each map, drawing and recollection gave birth to a new possibility,
Speaker 1: then perhaps the park thrived only in this constant negotiation,
Speaker 1: never charted once and for all but a living, breathing palimpsest.
Speaker 1: After so much pursuit, my emotional stance had changed. No frustration,
Speaker 1: no certainty, but a quiet embrace. I found kinship not
Speaker 1: in the shared memories that proved my own right, but
Speaker 1: in those exchanges with others, where contradiction was the start
Speaker 1: of the story, not a sorry end. Days resumed their
Speaker 1: easy rhythm. The Tuesday walkers laughed down winding roots, sometimes
Speaker 1: remembering a bench in one place, sometimes in another, never
Speaker 1: pausing long to wonder why I passed an afternoon beside
Speaker 1: the pond, striking up a conversation with a stranger about
Speaker 1: the statue. I always thought he faced the other way,
Speaker 1: the man said, pointing, only to realize neither of us
Speaker 1: could recall which way the heron had first gazed. A
Speaker 1: mutual uncertainty inspired a laugh. What would happen if we
Speaker 1: both agreed to remember it facing east, I wondered aloud.
Speaker 1: He shrugged. Maybe we just invented a new tradition. Something
Speaker 1: inside me had settled the urge to chart with absolute fidelity,
Speaker 1: to adjudicate every line and label receded. Curiosity gave weight
Speaker 1: to kind of affectionate wonder at the way even careful
Speaker 1: maps were only ever sketches, footprints in the sand, not
Speaker 1: blueprints in granite. My more recent map drafts now bore
Speaker 1: marginal notes. Some remember two benches here? Or history disputed?
Speaker 1: Ask Eddie Alyx the children. I began to include stories
Speaker 1: alongside coordinate, as if the stories themselves might reveal truths
Speaker 1: unavailable to simple geometry. Whenever asked to speak at local events,
Speaker 1: I made the park my favorite subject. Its shifting roots
Speaker 1: and benches, I would explain, did not reflect bureaucratic failure,
Speaker 1: nor even the scatterbrained memory of its stewards, but instead
Speaker 1: its glory, a place so loved, so present in web
Speaker 1: after web of personal connection and legend, that not even
Speaker 1: the ground resisted the collective wish. On my last Tuesday
Speaker 1: walk of early summer, I sat once more at the
Speaker 1: memorial bench that ought not have existed. The sun filtered
Speaker 1: through the catalpas in a pattern that felt at once
Speaker 1: dearly familiar and subtly new. The path curved away ahead,
Speaker 1: shaded by trees that, in my mind were both centuries
Speaker 1: old and freshly planted. I traced the bench plaque, the
Speaker 1: name still there, though the script changed with each season,
Speaker 1: and pondered the roll of memory, mapping, and desire in
Speaker 1: shaping the land beneath my feet. If the park was
Speaker 1: co created in mind and practice, how could I ever
Speaker 1: truly finish the map? I found myself smiling at the impossibility,
Speaker 1: comforted by the sense that perhaps all places contained this layering,
Speaker 1: only more quietly concealed, waiting for some attentive walker to
Speaker 1: stumble upon the seam and ask, was it always like this? Maybe?
Speaker 1: I thought, the world is an atlas of such unmapped grounds, inviting, inexhaustible,
Speaker 1: quietly awaiting the curious. I breathed in the mingled scent
Speaker 1: of grass, loam and late lilac. A call of distant
Speaker 1: laughter drifted over the pond. The park endured, unruly and beloved,
Speaker 1: an invitation to keep walking, keep remembering, and never assume
Speaker 1: the lines beneath our feet are final. And that is
Speaker 1: the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
Speaker 1: you in the next one.