Just Saying: Finding people by painting in the park

My writing and editing consulting business began winding down a while back as friends and colleagues who fed me work over the years gradually left the employment arena.

I began to ponder volunteer opportunities. For a time I worked for the New York City Department of Education. I wrote brochures aimed at parents alerting them to special programs not widely known for kids, particularly to those for whom English was a second, non-fluent language.

I was pretty good at it, or so I thought, but when it came time to start a new three-month tour, they said they didn’t have the money to pay me. This was puzzling because the outfit that placed me in the position asked the city to pay a tiny stipend of several bucks a day just for the heck of it.

Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought.

I had long wondered about volunteering for the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that has maintained the park since the 1980s when the park had fallen into a dreadful state of disarray — hard to imagine by its pristine, jewel-like condition today.

There were raking, weeding and snow-shoveling jobs available, along with stints in the information kiosks dotted around the park. But I didn’t bite. Then last summer, the Conservancy started a crew that focused on painting, mostly of park benches.

I bit.

It has become a favorite question of mine to friends and acquaintances: How many benches are there in Central Park? For starters, no one in his right mind would ever consider this question. It’s like wondering how many ticks are on the Island.

You don’t need to know and certainly don’t want to know. But as a member of the paint crew, or gang as I prefer to call it, you obviously learn the number of benches in your first painting session. I guessed 1,500, which seemed ridiculously high, even for an 800-acre park.

The park has 9,000 benches, which still seems utterly improbable, although we have painted some 1,900 of them so far.

There are several types of benches but the ones we most often paint are the ones with circular steel arm rests that we refer to as Robert Moses benches, after the maniacal builder of New York parks, bridges and expressways. I am not sure of the veracity of this nomenclature but that’s what we call them.

The protocol is to paint the steel arms black first and then the wood slats green second. We break into two groups for the green: Those with rollers for the accessible parts and those with brushes for everything else. Like most painting projects, the work is pleasantly mind-numbing, which more than ever these days is a state of being much to be desired.

The gang paints on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 9 to noon, but I and my painting pals prefer just Wednesdays. I consider them to be some of my favorite people and I look forward to congregating with them every week. The stalwarts are Mark and Stacey and Joe with one-time appearances from all manner of folks of all ages.

We lost Eric when he became a New York City cop and Erin when she got a marketing job with some startup, although she said she would rather be painting.

Then there is Yushko, a delightfully charming woman whose age could be anywhere from 75 to 105, so wise and friendly as to demolish the whole concept of age altogether. One time early on, she was painting the back of a bench and I was painting the front. I said to her,

“You seem like an artist to me.”

She stopped and exclaimed, “Jim, I am an artist! How did you know!” I said I sensed something in her aura or some such claptrap. She said she felt something similar about me.

Well, I write a little bit, I said.

“I knew it!” she said, and we’ve been buddies ever since.

Some weeks ago, Yushko came running up to me to report that an elderly man had fallen.

She recruited another guy and we ran over to help the guy up. He had a beatific grin, seemed unharmed and, once we got him on his feet, said he was one of the champion fallers in the city. He cheerily ambled away and Yushko and I headed back our benches.

There are eight million stories in the Naked City and this has been one of them.

Last week, Lyall, the affable foreman of the paint gang, emailed us with the astounding news that he had been laid off in a cost-cutting maneuver. This was impossible to digest, and the paint gang has been suspended for the time being.

It will be difficult to replace Lyall and his corny jokes, and I for one may simply retire from the paint gang. But I know precisely where the bench is where Yushko and I had our little epiphany. It’s not far from where the champion faller did what he does best.