ON MA PARKER’S TREE —IN BROOKLYN

In my youth in the 1950s a great American plane tree ( Platanus occidentalis )  a seventy foot tall sycamore—dominated the sidewalk on our city block in Brooklyn’s New Utrecht neighborhood.   The tree’s massive, shaggy-barked bole was so big four giggling ten year old kids holding hands couldn't join together to reach around it.  Its great curling roots, like those that entwined Laocooon and his sons, rose from the pebbly red soil  to lift and  crack the sidewalk squares and push the carefully laid NY City stone curbing out of line.  Local elders reminisced that the widow, Ma Parker,  the first person to own the 1920s era house in front of which it grew—planted the tree in honor of her son who fell at Belleau Wood, France during WW I. 

In the concrete and asphalt canyons of my youth in Brooklyn Ma Parker’s tree was always there  a sign of persistent nature..growing across from my house so I could always look through a grime soot stained glass and see it in its tangled natural magnificence.  It seemed to boldly assert the existence of  another  green and natural world—among the smog, noise, smoke, brick and asphalt in hard angled surfaces of a man-made world I knew only.

In summer the first birds species I came to know—the English Sparrow and the Starling— twittered among its shade dappled branches.  Its young and fuzzy gray-green buds sprouted in the Spring into bright green tri-lobed  leaves to wave and tremble in the summer breeze.  Its light and dark shadow patterns cooled the asphalt and concrete from which it sprang.  A great branch arising close to the ground  above its swelling base,  gave access to agile and adventurous  youngsters into the secrets of its higher (and dangerous) cool and shadowy branches.  Below, in the tree’s cool shade Johnny Rico’s grandma dozed in her rickety chair on the red brick stoop.  Above her, birds sang among the branches and gray squirrels ghosted lightly from limb to limb.  In the Fall, the  leaves turned  red and gold and as winter approached they browned and curled up like old man’s hands to fall on asphalt and concrete —unable to return as humus to the asphalt covered earth. Winter winds pushed up brown leaf windrows and woolen covered kids happily shuffled among them just to hear the leaves complain.  It was in those cold gray days that one noticed the hanging seed balls —“itchy balls’ we called them— which only then became apparent among bare leaved terminal branches of Ma Parker’s tree.  

Our block’s well loved sycamore boldly asserted to our young minds each day of the year and in each season that someplace outside of our cityscape world there exited another land—of clean fresh air and greenery where nature ruled over man.  Each year, like a persistent weed growing in a concrete crack it sprouted its green leaves and made us watch the grand designs of nature as it grew to top over the highest local roofs.  Its very existence, against all odds— its age and permanence — asserted to us that the natural world existed —even if out of our view—in the form of this massive tree—too big to tame, too massive to cut down. It was there to state the ascendency of Mother Nature over what mere humans could devise for for us and our earth.