Ft. Tryon Medieval Festival

Every year about this time black velvet, leather, and chain mail invade my neighborhood.  That’s when thousands (30,000 by last count) descend on Ft. Tryon Park for the Medieval Festival.  That’s also when local residents bemoan the invasion of our serene slice of Manhattan (the rest of the year we delude ourselves, saying nobody knows or surely they’d live here, when in fact it’s just too far away) and flee for the day.  The crowd mills past booths hawking bustiers, swords, crystal balls, incense, and other paraphernalia verging on S&M and necessary to the gothic lifestyle. Food stands sell giant turkey drumsticks (no one told the organizers that the turkey is native to North America and would have been unknown to the Middle Ages), mead, barbeque pork, and, in a geographical twist of fate, gyros, baklava and thick creamy yoghurt with walnuts and honey (the same culprit responsible for the turkey also failed to mention to the Greeks that this is mostly a Celtic affair).  Grandstands spring up on the Cloisters lawn across which unicorns and great sturdy steeds canter in jousts, churning up the grass and leaving a muddy mess the next day.  This year, there was a quidditch match (how they got the brooms aloft remains a mystery to me, I had escaped to lower Manhattan and arrived only for the joust at the end of the day).  Wizards, masked wielders of medieval torture, and busty women with loosely laced bodices roam the crowd.  Troubadours play flutes, ouds, mandolins, and tambourines while women in middle eastern dress spin sinuously, their hips encircled with jingling belts.  There is a certain cringe factor to the Medieval Festival, but I enjoy myself.  It is one of the last outdoor events before colder weather arrives and, though I would swim in the bustiers on offer, I am a fan of nonconformity.

Where the Bees Are

When I need to escape, I go to The Cloisters.  I've been there so many times that these days I make a cursory pass by the unicorn tapestries, skip the rest of the collection, and head to the medieval herb garden in the Bonnefont Cloister.  I forget about wrinkles, skin cancer, or sunspots, and sit in direct sunlight on the worn wooden bench that stands along the wall facing the Hudson.  The bench is so long that its middle has been boughed downward by the elements and thousands of visitors before me.  Potted plants line up in front of the bench.  I know they are Mediterranean plants, meant to evoke Southern France, Spain, and Italy.  But to me they are also Californian plants.  The rosemary, oregano, olive, fig, orange, oleander, jasmine, lemon, and pomegranate are the same ones that grow in abundance in my mother's garden.  Each fall, I look forward to a big box of pomegranates picked from the tree that has produced these fruits since my childhood.  My mother carefully boxes them up, sends them cross country to me, and I spend chilly evenings extracting the seeds, each a ruby.  Every winter, another box full of lemons, miniature suns tenfold juicier than store bought fruit, arrives.  I have my own jasmine which I try unsuccessfully to coax into blossom in the darkness of my New York apartment.  So, in the quiet of The Cloisters (even school children lower their voices here) I sit near these plants that remind me of home.  Last weekend, having spent several hours in the herb garden and feeling like myself again, I exited through the Cuxa cloister.  Near the fountain in its center bloomed lavender flowers alive with bees.  I had thought all summer that the bees were fewer in number this year, that they had chosen somewhere else to make honey.  I leaned closer to the flowers:  at long last I had found the bees.  Perhaps the recent cool weather had helped them wake up.  Heading home through the Heather Garden, I walked past the passion flowers, which during the heat wave had wilted and hung forlorn on their vines.  Now they had unfurled their petals.  On each sat one or two bees staggering in the pollen and drunkenly rejoicing in their luck.