May Day

Last week Hannah had a day off work.  It was May 1st, also known as May Day, also known as International Workers Day.  There was supposed to be a massive rally in New York, organized by Occupy Wall Street (although "organized" is a term the Occupy folks like to avoid)

I came home from work early so that we could go to the Brooklyn museum. Which, it turned out, was closed on Tuesdays.

So we went and got Elliot from daycare about 4pm, and the plan was to bring him to the site of the Occupy Wall Street march.  The schedule said the marchers would leave Union Square at 4pm, so I figured we would go straight to Zuccotti Park and have some quiet time there before the march arrived.

Problem was, they didn’t leave Union Square until 5pm.  When we got to Zuccotti Park it was dead quiet, just a few people waiting for the express bus, some cops hanging out with plastic cuffs strapped to their belts, big SUVs with higher-ups in suits listening to walkie-talkies.  There was a middle-aged lady wrapped in layers of brown jacket, with Ziploc bags of food which she fed to pigeons.  Elliot was drawn to her and her surrounding flock.  He jammed his hand into the center of the pigeon mob, while we stood back terrified that he was going to catch some strange bird virus that would kill him, us, and the rest of humanity. 

After Elliot had won the hearts of every cop in Zuccotti Park (I wish had a mini-sandwich board sign saying “I support Occupy Wall Street” to put on him), and had tried to eat several clods of dirt from the flowerbeds, we decided to move along. 

We were all getting hungry, and I figured if we moved North maybe we could intercept the march as it came down.  So we grabbed a few slices, liberally sprinkled with oregano, garlic powder, and hots, and headed to City Hall Park. 

Which, if you’ve never been, is truly a gorgeous park.

Here’s the park I eat lunch in when the weather is nice, Stuyvesant Square Park:

Looks nice, right?  Nice fountain, lush trees.  

But here’s City Hall Park, where Hannah gets to eat lunch:

So we toddled around there for a while.  You see that little mini-pool in the lower right corner of the photo?  Elliot wanted to go in there.  I told him he couldn’t and he didn’t like that.  We compromised on letting him lean his belly against the round stone and bend far enough over that he could splash his hand in filthy, coin-filled, pigeon-feces-strewn city water. 

Angel that he is, Elliot rooted through the filth and found a white flower petal floating in the water.  After he pinched it between his little fingers and tried to pass it to me, I suggested he give it to his mommy, which he thought was a genius idea.  Off he waddled, repeating “mama, mama, mama, mama” over and over as he toddled from the fountain back to the bench where she was sitting.  

Then he came back and hunted that pool, and the three others just like it, for more flower petals to give mommy.

We had to leave when the cops closed the park.  I asked why, and they said "the march might be coming this way."  

Oh, and we saw four cops approach a man carrying a Communist flag and tell him he had to leave the park.