Busted by the park police!

It’s not nearly as good as my dad’s park police story (ask me sometime), but it’s worth telling anyway. I met up with two friends from high school (and junior high and elementary school for that matter) downtown and we sat on a blanket in Battery Park eating bagel chips and drinking red wine from paper cups as the sun set. We were laughing (a bit too boisterously perhaps) over ex- and current girlfriends and boyfriends as a bright orange sun came down over Jersey. We had nearly finished the bottle, when a park policeman marched over and told us he’d have to take it from us.

“But it’s empty,” Sarah said. He took the bottle anyhow and asked us to pour out the wine in our little paper cups. “Into the grass?” I asked. He said yes. “How uncouth,” I thought, as Sarah, Don and I poured red wine into the green grass.

We watched as he walked off, the setting sun shining on him, a bottle in one hand, looking suspiciously like a green-clad wino.