Most days I take a one hour walk around Prospect Park which sits one and a half streets from my home. It's a majestic park, designed by the same landscape architects who designed Central Park in Manhattan, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. The web site describes the park as a 526-acre urban oasis located in the heart of Brooklyn featuring a 90-acre long meadow, 60-acre lake, Brooklyn's only forest, the nation's first urban audubon center, a zoo, and the Celebrate Brooklyn! Performing Arts Summer Festival. Really, it's a great park.
You might find one oddity about my walk: Weekdays I walk outside the park, along its perimeter, and weekends I walk a path inside the park. Being the results-oriented perfectionist that I am, and expediency being my major objective when I power-walk, I find the more level outside perimeter easier. And I still get to enjoy the foliage over the fence.
Sometimes I walk elsewhere just to break the monotony of routine. I'll walk an hour to buy groceries (and then bus back) and once a season I head to another Brooklyn marvel, Coney Island. That's where I headed this past Memorial Day weekend. It was an exquisite day, 70 F, sunny with a cool breeze, the city was gentle and tranquil with everyone gone and so I hoofed two hours to the boardwalk along the Atlantic Ocean that distinguishes Coney Island. When I got there I desperately wanted an ice cream cone and to sit on a bench with it and stare out at the surf and sand. So I walked the equivalent of 15 streets along the boardwalk to where the famed 100 year old roller coaster is, the Cyclone, and there found the food vendors. Ice cream cone sought and bought, I retired to a bench and was joyously licking away at my cone when a voice broke into my reverie.
A nice looking young man was inquiring where I bought my cone. After I told him he asked me some more cone-specific questions. Now I realized this was no longer a conversation about ice cream, but he was trying to pick me up. If you don't know the meaning of "pick up" as I discovered my Texas girlfriend didn't when I called her moments later to relate this remarkable event, she said after I explained, "Oh, you were being hit on!" During my pick up, my young man, unperturbed by my not knowing what a Big Dipper is (do you?), asked if he could bring me another cone. I did not divulge that one is quite sufficient for a diabetic, but instead that one was all I could manage. Not to be deterred, he asked if he could bring me a drink. At that point, I pleasantly waved away his offers and he went on his way down the boardwalk.
I sat for another half hour
enjoying the tranquility of the beach and then meandered back down the
boardwalk to where I had entered to get the bus home. It was a perfect day: my
walk, the view, an ice cream cone and a nice young man. Happiness really does
come in the small moments: a slice of sunshine, an unexpected human
interaction, and not least of all a small, perfect scoop of vanilla chocolate
chip ice cream in a sugar cone. When you see the cover of my new book this July, 50 Diabetes Myths That Can Ruin Your Life: And the 50 Diabetes
Truths That Can Save It, (available wherever books are sold, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble online) you will smile and remember this story.