Jogging the other morning through Riverside Park on New York’s west side I came across the strangest sight. I was running along a path lined with cherry trees. The trees were coated with cream-colored blossoms, an early spring visual feast. I saw a pink rectangle on one of the trunks.
The rectangle was a sheet of pink paper encased in waterproof clear plastic and tied to the trunk. A poem was typed on the paper:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
The poem is by A. E. Housman, an English Victorian poet and classical scholar. I don’t happen to like Housman—too cloying and stilted even when, as is the case with most of his poems (like this one about the cherry tree), he’s writing elegiacally about lost youth, lost love and death.
But so what about my taste. The point is someone took a great deal of trouble to type up this poem, protect it against the elements and affix it to a New York cherry tree just as spring burst into bloom. I ran on and found more pink sheets affixed to more trees, and also to a fence separating the trees from the path. You could not pass along this path without stopping and reading Housman.
Why would someone do such a thing? This being New York, maybe that’s a naive question. Everyone is doing everything all the time here. Still, I wondered. Who’s the Housman lover? What compelled them to share their love?
It’s that idea of sharing that got me. An anonymous act of generosity. Someone doing something for others, just because.
How antithetical that is to the American ethos! America is all about individuals, competition, making money, being successful, being all you can be. Americans like to tell themselves they’re generous and community-oriented but that’s simply not true. Every trend in American history points the other way, toward obliterating communities in favor of economic development and personal gratification.
Americans work longer hours, watch more television, retreat behind more electronic screens, spend more time in their cars, live in bigger, more fortress-like houses than ever before. This is the statistic that makes me sickest: seven in 10 American children have a television in their bedroom, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. How much more isolated can you get, off in your room, glued to a screen?
One of the things I love about New York and other big cities is their pushback against that kind of isolation. There are simply too many people here and not enough room for solitude. Of course sometimes that drives Kate and me crazy. But I think it’s healthy. There is nothing in the Gospel about getting enough me-time. The life of faith is meant to be a life devoted to others. In the big city there are lots and lots of others.
And every now and then one of those others reaches out and offers themselves to everyone else. They type up a poem they love, protect it against the elements and affix it to a cherry tree hung with snow. So small, so simple. So unforgettably wonderful.
