Forest Hills
I saw a poster just now advertising the 11th annual Lantern Festival of Forest Hills, which I plan on going to. Forest Hills is the name of my current but soon to be former neighborhood. The poster caught my eye in the first place because its festival is scheduled to happen on the same day that the sixth Harry Potter movie comes out. The poster went so far as to give the rain date for the festival (in case it rains on the HP day), but not the location so I looked to their website for this key piece of information. Apparently, the location is Forest Hills and all of a sudden I don't know where that is. Or what it is because I thought until now that it was a T stop. Even calling it a neighborhood was a bit of a stretch on my part. So what is Forest Hills? Is it a park? A cemetery? A hilly forest? You know, it's pretty cool learning new things about old places. Especially when the new things are big game changers. Completely alters your perspective of what was solid uncurious fact.
I still don't know what Forest Hills is, but I did find this really cool article on their website about... um... well it's kind of a deep thought the author has about time. Hard to explain really. Here it is:
http://foresthillstrust.blogspot.com/2009/04/discovery-by-ee-cummings-grave.html
The Trust's Program Assistant, Meredith Safford, and I were w[a]ndering around the Cemetery admiring the burgeoning bloom of the foliage, when we came across the grave of E.E. Cummings. I hadn't visited the site in awhile, so I suggested we stop.
Behind his family's lot, there is a wall of rocks with large cracks between them, sizable enough to fit your hand, or, as was the case on this day, any number of mementos. My eye caught a blue plastic bag stuffed between two of the layers. It was old and dirty, which disconcerted me a little - I wasn't sure if I should pick it up or leave it be. Curiosity won over sanitation, as it always does, and, opening the bag, I discovered an equally bedraggled metal case, the kind usually containing loose tobacco or snuff. Also disconcerting. Even still, my desire to know what was inside propelled me on. Of all of the possible items I could have imagined inside of this case, what I actually found surprised me: a tiny bound book filled with stamps and notes and dates. I quickly realized that the stamps were "team" emblems and the dates marked the team's discovery of this very book. A scavenger hunt. The earliest entry was dated in 2003; the latest from just last year. Also in the box was a little note explaining: a website called letterboxing.com (which is no longer running) presents groups with enigmatic clues that lead them to various spots around the city. In the six years since the first entry, some twenty teams have made their mark in the book. Many of them wrote laudatory comments about the Cemetery: "What a beautiful place!" and "So serene!" and the like.
Meredith and I got such a kick out of the book, we wrote our own entry, as Team FHET. As soon as we dated our page, I was suddenly struck by contradictory notions of transience and permanence. The book itself exemplified the immutable nature of such a place as Forest Hills; but the individual notes spoke of a very specific time with very specific people, who have moved on, who came through the Cemetery, maybe for the only time in their lives, and left it again. These two notions are not incompatible - in fact, they belong together; one defines the other. Much like the permanence of death defines the ephemeralness of life.
We put the book back in the case, the case back in the bag, and the bag back in the wall, leaving it there for someone else to find, to discover, like we did, another marvelous nuance of this remarkable place.
On a side note, sometimes when the conductors announce the arrival of the train to Forest Hills, through their fuzzy audio equipment, or maybe it was their Bostonian accents, it sometimes sounds like they were saying "Farthest Hills," which always made me feel like I was in a Harry Potter book. I guess it just has the flavor of "Little Hangleton" and "Shell Cottage" to me. Whenever I hear "Farthest Hills" over the speakers, I imagine myself arriving at an obscure village surrounded by dark woods where the neighbors are somewhat secluded from each other but when they do interact, there is a clear sense of attentiveness between them. The residents carry themselves as guardians of their village, vigilant of ominous occurrences but also respectfully aware of the arcane creatures and magic that live in the forest with them. "Arriving at Farthest Hills..."
I still don't know what Forest Hills is, but I did find this really cool article on their website about... um... well it's kind of a deep thought the author has about time. Hard to explain really. Here it is:
http://foresthillstrust.blogspot.com/2009/04/discovery-by-ee-cummings-grave.html
The Trust's Program Assistant, Meredith Safford, and I were w[a]ndering around the Cemetery admiring the burgeoning bloom of the foliage, when we came across the grave of E.E. Cummings. I hadn't visited the site in awhile, so I suggested we stop.
Behind his family's lot, there is a wall of rocks with large cracks between them, sizable enough to fit your hand, or, as was the case on this day, any number of mementos. My eye caught a blue plastic bag stuffed between two of the layers. It was old and dirty, which disconcerted me a little - I wasn't sure if I should pick it up or leave it be. Curiosity won over sanitation, as it always does, and, opening the bag, I discovered an equally bedraggled metal case, the kind usually containing loose tobacco or snuff. Also disconcerting. Even still, my desire to know what was inside propelled me on. Of all of the possible items I could have imagined inside of this case, what I actually found surprised me: a tiny bound book filled with stamps and notes and dates. I quickly realized that the stamps were "team" emblems and the dates marked the team's discovery of this very book. A scavenger hunt. The earliest entry was dated in 2003; the latest from just last year. Also in the box was a little note explaining: a website called letterboxing.com (which is no longer running) presents groups with enigmatic clues that lead them to various spots around the city. In the six years since the first entry, some twenty teams have made their mark in the book. Many of them wrote laudatory comments about the Cemetery: "What a beautiful place!" and "So serene!" and the like.
Meredith and I got such a kick out of the book, we wrote our own entry, as Team FHET. As soon as we dated our page, I was suddenly struck by contradictory notions of transience and permanence. The book itself exemplified the immutable nature of such a place as Forest Hills; but the individual notes spoke of a very specific time with very specific people, who have moved on, who came through the Cemetery, maybe for the only time in their lives, and left it again. These two notions are not incompatible - in fact, they belong together; one defines the other. Much like the permanence of death defines the ephemeralness of life.
We put the book back in the case, the case back in the bag, and the bag back in the wall, leaving it there for someone else to find, to discover, like we did, another marvelous nuance of this remarkable place.
On a side note, sometimes when the conductors announce the arrival of the train to Forest Hills, through their fuzzy audio equipment, or maybe it was their Bostonian accents, it sometimes sounds like they were saying "Farthest Hills," which always made me feel like I was in a Harry Potter book. I guess it just has the flavor of "Little Hangleton" and "Shell Cottage" to me. Whenever I hear "Farthest Hills" over the speakers, I imagine myself arriving at an obscure village surrounded by dark woods where the neighbors are somewhat secluded from each other but when they do interact, there is a clear sense of attentiveness between them. The residents carry themselves as guardians of their village, vigilant of ominous occurrences but also respectfully aware of the arcane creatures and magic that live in the forest with them. "Arriving at Farthest Hills..."