Paradise Found

I’m taking a detour away from gardening topics today to ponder something I read on the Internet (and, yes, I know treating things on the Internet seriously is the beginning of an excursion into a rabbit hole from which there is no extraction). The subject of the post was ‘What is Paradise’.  The author posted a vintage-20^th-century photo of a palm tree by the water and explained why this was his or her ideal place.

Which got me to wondering what was my own perfect place. At the very ripe age of 76, I have come to the conclusion Paradise can exist in multiple places. It can exist in memory and it can exist in real time. It can be a place and it can be something that happened in a place that is otherwise pedestrian.

Me, in my back yard, age 11

My childhood back yard was paradise (except when it needed to be cleaned up after a hurricane; and it lost part of its glow when mowing it became my responsibility). But it was a special place where I was Boy King; tracking lizards, building treehouses (hint: Tamarind tree limbs break just by looking at them the wrong way) and eating oranges fresh off the tree.

I camped out in that back yard. It was at the age of 5 or 6 that, late one evening writing on a sheet of paper in a tent by flashlight, I discovered numbers are connected and keep increasing. I wrote from 1 to something like 600 just to make certain my discovery had no fatal flaw.

The Cape Florida lighthouse

Key Biscayne, the island south of Miami Beach and connected to the mainland by a causeway, was the paradise of my teen years. Not so much the large county park that occupied the north half of the island. Crandon Park had a fine beach but there were too many people. My preferred places were the stub of a beach at Bear Cut or the deserted, pre-state-park beach by the Cape Florida lighthouse at the southern tip of the island. These were places where only teens of a certain age could go (illegally, in the case of the lighthouse), and much kissing went on.

Our brownstone in Boerum Hill

Brooklyn was the paradise of my late twenties. I could not believe I actually lived there and owned a genuine brownstone on a street with a row of 19^th Century brownstones on either side of it. The Bergen Street subway station was just five minutes distant, and all of New York was a subway ride away; Betty and I made the most of every day: seeing shows, museums, and her beloved Yankees. We even saw a World Series game.

Me in the Marais, early 2000s

Paris and London were my twin paradises of my thirties, forties and fifties. Both cities were magical. I could not get enough of them. I invented reasons to go to them and I tried (unsuccessfully) to get myself transferred there by two employers. Both cities were (and still are) steeped in history yet attuned to ‘today’. The people were tolerant of our thick American accents and broken French.

On the beach at Hana, early 1980s

But paradise was also a small hotel on the island of Maui in a village called Hana. Betty and I discovered it in 1980 on our second trip to the Islands following an intensely disappointing first stay in Honolulu and Hilo. For more than twenty years following that encounter, for the last week in January and first week in February, we called it home; amid friends we never knew before that first visit. Alas, in the early 2000’s, a woman named Caroline Hunt also discovered it and decided it needed to be more ‘upscale’. She didn’t pave paradise; she just ruined it.

In my sixties and seventies, paradise is a small town in New England; one that logic and greed dictates ought not to exist, but does. Medfield has defied the odds and remained a village free of Big Box stores and cheek-by-jowl fast food emporiums. Its borders are watersheds and forested reservations, yet it is just 18 miles from the center of Boston. 

With my oldest friend,
Hank Rawlings,
2025, in Florida

But paradise is also a state of being. It is the sight of old friends and being in their presence after a too-long absence. Paradise is standing in front of a group of strangers and making them laugh. Paradise is working on my hands and knees in a native plant garden I helped bring into being; and co-managing an acre of vegetable gardens where 70 families not only are growing food for their own table, but placing their surplus in wheelbarrows every week to share with those less fortunate. Wherever there is joy, there is the potential for paradise.

Will there be other places I will come to think of as paradise? I only hope I have sufficient years remaining to find out. Seven decades ago, I traded the security of my back yard paradise for the opportunity to see and explore a wider world. I have spent time on six continents and stopped counting countries visited when I got to 50. I truly do not know if there are additional paradises out there, but I’m willing to give it a try.