From Men In Black To The World In Pink

For me, Flushing Meadow-Corona Park brings back memories of the World's Fair, which I visited with my family when I was about six years old.

For you, it might be associated with one of the most popular movies of all time:  Men In Black.  I saw and enjoyed it, too, but those early memories and associations never leave us, or so it seems.

Nonetheless, I will grant that I think of MIB, especially with the 25th anniversary of its release imminent. In the movie,  the mothership crashes through the Unisphere, the large globe sculpture that has become an emblem of Queens, "the world's borough."  (It's said to be the most linguistically and culturally diverse county in the U.S.)  

I would bet that the Men In Black never envisioned a World In Pink.

I stopped by the park the other day, during a ride out to Nassau County, down to the South Shore and up to the North.  A couple of years ago, on that very same piece of land, I saw a bloom of cherry blossoms that rivals any other I've seen.  If I recall correctly, it was around the third week, or possibly near the end of, this month.  Still, when I saw the trees the other day, their buds had bloomed enough to color the world in a way that, I believe, even the Men In Black would appreciate.

The First Time Without Her

Around this time last year, I had just returned from my trip to Greece.

And it was my mother's birthday.  Little did I, or anyone, know it would be her last.

Before taking a quick ride out to Flushing Meadow Corona Park (site of the climactic Men In Black scene and the "the valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby), I called my father.  Though he is not religious, he went to church and lit a candle in honor of my mother, who was not terribly religious but attended mass and lit candles.  We agreed that it was strange--and, for him, lonely--to experience her birthday without her.

Of course, I was thinking about those rides I took along the ocean during my visits with her and Dad in Florida and my high school days in New Jersey.  She never rode with me (or anyone, as far as I know) but she never discouraged me from cycling.  She seemed to understand that it was, and always would be, part of who I am.

As she is.

Blame It On The Moon

Once again, I cut through Flushing Meadows-Corona Park on my way home from work.  It was the site of the 1964-65 World's Fair, for which its iconic Unisphere was built.  Nearly three decades later, Men In Black was filmed there.


A German tourist I met in the park reminded me of that.  In fact, he said, it was from watching Men In Black that he first learned about the borough of Queens.  I was reminded of the time three young Germans approached me near the West Fourth Street subway station in Greenwich Village.  They asked me how to get to the South Bronx.  They wanted to go there because they had recently seen Fort Apache, The South Bronx.  I tried, to no avail, to dissuade them from going.


But I didn't have to do anything like that for the youngish man from Munich I met today.  He remarked on the wonderful light of this afternoon turning into this evening in that park as I took this photo:

All of the light has seemed different since my moonlight ride on the wee hours of Saturday morning and the "Super Full Moon" that rose that evening.  Plus, it seems--even more than other full moons I've seen--to have brought some strange sights my way.


I encountered one of them in the bike rack at work:

I wondered whether that vestige of a downtube was there only to support the front derailleur.  There seems to be no other rationale for it.  Maybe it was conceived by someone who believes that we have heads so that we'll have someplace to put our helmets. 


Or maybe it was designed by the same person whose bike was attached to a fire hydrant by the longest chain made of 3/4" thick case-hardened links I ever saw.  I doubt anyone could have cut that chain, at least not with the sort of tools bike thieves carry with them. But it didn't take someone with a PhD in quantum mechanics to figure out that he could lift that bike and chain over the hydrant and into the back of his van. (I didn't see the theft. I just know that professional thieves, at least at that time, used vans. So, that bike's owner and I assumed that scenario played out.)


The sad thing is that faux seat tube isn't even the worst piece of bike design I've ever seen.  Actually, I've seen a lot of things much worse than that.  You tend to come across them when you work in a bike shop for a while.

Maybe the designers of that bike and the owner of the bike that got stolen from a fire hydrant could have blamed the moon--even if it wasn't the Super Full Moon.


And that friendly German tourist and I can blame it for the photos we took in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.