My Mostly Happy Life: Autobiography of a Climbing Tree

1

Young Samuel Swerling

Trees get to know a lot of people.

The longer we live, the more people we know.

And the more we know about them.

Over the years we, meaning my fellow climbing trees and I, have developed a huge vocabulary of human beings. Mostly, they are city dwellers, except for the arborist who shaped us.

His name is Alonso Hannah, he came from the Pacific Northwest, and he only has one arm. He lost his left arm just below the elbow in an accident that he never discussed. But the loss didn’t seem to affect him, because he was bigger and stronger and more capable than ninety-nine percent of the men out there who weren’t missing a limb.

Early in his association with Mr. Swerling, I heard him grunt, A man only needs one shovel, and a shovel only needs one arm to dig a hole to plant a tree.

At first, Alonso wasn’t a friendly man. But he knew what he was doing, and nobody has ever quite accomplished what he did in terms of shaping trees. I’m not sure if some of the ideas were Alonso’s or if all of them originated with Sam Swerling. Either way, you can’t argue with results, and by the time they were finished with us, we looked great.

Well, we thought we looked great. So did Sam. And so did all those children.

That’s what counts.

Or what used to.

Back then, I thought of Sam as Mr. Swerling. I still do. But he didn’t like formality, and made sure everyone involved in creating the park called him by his first name. Not Samuel Swerling, either.

Sam. Just Sam.

I tried. I still try. But in my heart of hearts, he will always be Mr. Swerling to me.

That is how much I respect him. That is how much I love him.

He’s gone now, of course. He was born in a big slum in our big city in 1911, and he died at a family picnic in his very own—my park—two weeks before his ninety-first birthday. You don’t have to know much about Sam’s early years, except that he survived the grim and gritty streets of a childhood during which, he later told newspaper reporters, he never saw a tree. That’s right. Until he was eighteen years old, Samuel Swerling had never seen a tree, a lawn, a garden, or a park.

But the city college he attended had a small quadrangle of grass surrounded by classrooms, and thriving within that lush green quarter-acre were half-a-dozen large and lovely elm trees. In the early 1980s, Dutch elm disease killed them and all of the elms in the city, but before they died, they were magnificent. When Mr. Swerling talked about those trees to interviewers, he always used the same four words: They stirred my soul.

I like that.

It affects me.

When I visualize Samuel Swerling, it is always as he was on the day that we met: A handsome young man with a high forehead and a prominent nose, his profile not unlike that on the face of the Indian on a Buffalo nickel. I can still see the rakish tilt of his fedora hat, his always-impeccable three-piece suit, his brightly colored polka dot necktie, and the mirror shine on his wingtip shoes.

But when I get to the left side of his chest where his beating heart should be, my memory substitutes a tiny arboretum, and I see fluttering leaves performing the task he ascribed so long ago to those beautiful elms.

They are stirring his soul.

I should give you a bit more background so that you can better understand the things that happened later.

Samuel Swerling’s parents were immigrants from a never-referred-to Baltic country that they were happy to escape from and forget. His father was a hard-working carpenter. His mother was a seamstress. He had an older brother named Jacob.

A photograph taken of the two boys when they were nine and ten years old shows them standing side-by-side, both wearing wrinkled white shirts and Sam in a scruffy necktie.

Sam’s left hand is on his hip; Jack’s hands are invisible to the camera but hanging loosely at his side, as relaxed as a gunfighter confident that his fingers are within easy reach of his six-shooter. They looked like miniature grown-ups, except that on their heads were the kinds of caps worn by newspaper boys in the early 1900s, and on their faces were the knowing grins of street urchins.

These boys were survivors.

And survive they did.

Their father saved the money he earned as a carpenter, and he invested it in real estate and formal dress wear. First he opened one tuxedo rental store. Then another. And another. By the time the Swerling boys were in their teens, each was managing a different tuxedo rental store after school and on weekends.

They went to college. Jack graduated, continued on to law school, and passed the bar. Sam dropped out of school to become an entrepreneur. By the time they entered the military for World War II, Jack was a practicing attorney, and Sam was a full-time inventor.

During the war years, Jack served as a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) in Europe, while Sam worked in the United States and England on communications devices, among which was one that taught Morse code to recruits.

Jack met his future wife in college, and they were already married before he enlisted.

Sam didn’t get married until ten years after the war.

Both had children.

Jack succeeded in his law practice and made enough money to move his family to the suburbs.

Sam succeeded on an even grander scale. He continued to invent (retractable wheels, folding luggage, rotating signs, convex mirrors, security systems), and he became a wealthy man. But he never moved out of the city that he loved, and he bought a five-bedroom condominium in an apartment building across the street from his park.

My park.

In it, thousands of children have played since the first trees, of which I am one, were planted.

It is where his wife strolled with her baby carriages after their children were born, and it is where all five of them played when they were growing up.

I was the first tree that Sam Swerling’s children climbed.

I was the first tree that his grandchildren climbed.

And with my arms outstretched, I will be the first tree that their children climb.

But perhaps it would be best not to anticipate events.

Chapter 2

Birth of a Park

In 1939, while the world was slogging through the swamp of the Great Depression, the City held a sale of derelict buildings that it had seized for back taxes. Samuel Swerling used every penny he had saved while working in his father’s tuxedo rental stores, and he bought four of them.

They were small structures that occupied an entire city block, but they were constructed so shabbily that they had no intrinsic value. The rocky terrain on which they were built was elevated above the level of the surrounding streets, suggesting that millions of years ago, the earth’s crust had surged upward at exactly that spot and created a shallow plateau. Sam wanted the land, not the buildings, so he donated them to the fire department for training exercises. His only condition was that after they had been incinerated, the city would remove the debris at its own expense.

This was accomplished before the beginning of World War II.

Alonso Hannah, Mr. Swerling’s arborist, was twenty-two-years-old when the United States entered the war. After repeated attempts to join the army, navy, coast guard, and marines, he reluctantly accepted that no branch of the military wanted a one-armed warrior, and he resigned himself to staying on the job that Mr. Swerling had given him before the first bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbor.

Alonso’s primary responsibility was to purchase, plant, and grow young trees for the park, and to train them into shapes that, as Mr. Swerling put it, positively begged children to leap into their branches and climb!

Sam Swerling vowed that others would enjoy what he, himself, had missed as a child: Up close-and-personal time spent with trees. Trees that boys and girls could study as if they were living books; trees in which they could observe birds and butterflies fluttering among the leaves; ants and caterpillars inching in and out of crevices; squirrels and chipmunks scampering up and down trunks. Trees where their little feet could find toeholds and their small hands clasp sturdy branches. Trees they could ascend to dizzying heights, eagerly gazing out upon streets, skyscrapers, and bridges, their eyes following the course of our river until it empties into the sea.

Sam Swerling was in love with trees.

And somewhere along the line, Alonso Hannah, his young, dour, and dedicated arborist, fell in love with us, too.

Before Mr. Swerling went to war, he and Alonso designed every aspect of the park. They poured over blueprints, drawings, and schematics. They decided where to drain groundwater; how much clean gravel and dirt to import; how to construct pathways; where to lay water pipes, install fountains, and build a foot bridge over a small flowing creek. They selected a pattern for the decorative wrought iron fence that would surround the park, and decided in which locations to plant grass, shrubs, ground cover, flowerbeds, and trees.

Among the trees that they planted were climbing trees (me and my pals); shade trees (maple, oak, and chestnut); flowering trees (dogwood, magnolia, and crape myrtle); and fruit trees (apple, cherry, and pear).

Sam Swerling obtained permits, applied for and received tax-exemptions, and signed a contract with the City wherein the Samuel Swerling Trust would retain ownership of the park, pay for park maintenance, and employ a full-time groundskeeper/gardener with the authority to hire part-time employees as needed and upon approval of the trustees. The City would be responsible for snow removal, trash disposal, replacing light bulbs on street lamps, and providing police protection.

In exchange for which, our gates would be kept open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and the park would be accessible to ragamuffins, socialites, delivery boys, amateur botanists, business executives, chess players, art students, rambunctious children, and everybody in between.

Surrounded as it was (and is) by elegant door-manned apartment buildings, the park’s location is an excellent deterrent to vandalism and vagrancy. The worst rash of criminal activity occurs every spring, when old ladies from nearby buildings stroll through the wrought iron entrance gate with pruning shears rolled up in sheets of newspaper, and sneak out fifteen minutes later with clusters of lilacs hidden in shopping bags the size of circus tents.

Alonso Hannah and his crew built the Samuel Swerling Park during the five years that his employer was off fighting Nazis during World War II.

It took all five of those years.

Although initially, Alonso was not a city boy, his work for Sam turned him into one, and after creating that two-acre island of greenery, the park became his entire life. It remained so until the day that he met Pepita St. Claire.

In looks and stature, Alonso Hannah loomed like a one-armed giant in a fairytale. He had broad slightly stooped shoulders and one big calloused hand. He was not a handsome young man and as he aged, his looks did not improve; but his face became friendlier. He had a nose like a drooping cucumber, a high forehead, tufts of dark red hair that banked either side of his bald pate like rusty shrubs, and bristling eyebrows that jutted out over hooded eyes. The combination should have been off-putting, but wasn’t. Nor were the deep creases on the sides of his mouth—a scowl on anyone else, but on Alonso, merely battle scars of a man who had spent too much time in the sun.

When he worked, and I can personally attest to this, since much of my life was spent in his presence, Alonso sang or hummed arias from operas. He had a beautiful baritone voice, and one year (the year he met Pepita), he sang so often and so loudly that out of sheer listening pleasure, my pals and I grew an extra foot in height.

Chapter 3

Pepita and Her Violin

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that trees can’t fall in love.

I have done so on more than one occasion.

I still do.

I usually fall in love with pretty girls in summer dresses, but not always. Once it was a middle-aged woman with large sad eyes and dark red lips. She wore a black velvet, fur-lined cape, held a white ermine muff, and walked through the park on snowy winter days like a banished Russian tsarina. Another time, I fell hard for a cheerful, easy-to-laugh waitress with a big bosom, brown eyes, bright blue lacquered nails, and dyed blond hair. Later that same year, I was captivated by an elderly lady with beautiful bones, delicate hands, and a tantalizingly sweet half-smile that suggested tender and happy memories.

My first encounter with Petita, though, was immersed in danger and preceded by screams, with violence and romance hard at their heels.

Help! Help! I heard from not far off, but before I could pinpoint the location, she stumbled into the light of the street lamp and hurdled herself through the entrance to the park.

When I think now of how she looked then, I remember an elfin beauty fleeing in fear for her life. She had shoulder-length fair hair, gossamer in the lamp light, skin as pearly white as the inside of a seashell, and terrified blue eyes. She lurched as she ran, because any grace she may have possessed was encumbered by the violin case that she clutched to her chest.

She continued past me, but drew to a confused halt thirty seconds later where the footpath forked left and right. Just then, Alonso Hannah, behemoth-like and larger than life, emerged from the greenery. As easily as if she were a child’s toy, he lifted her off the path, strode forward, and placed her on one of my lower limbs.

Stay here until I come back, he barked, and then he ran into the street.

It is a wondrous thing for a big, ungainly tree like me to hold a beautiful woman in my arms. I was more accustomed to the grabbing hands and scampering feet of children than I ever would be to the delicate soul who balanced on my branch like a creature made out of starlight. I was terrified that I would drop her.

I did not.

But I did get the chance to study her up close. Her face. Her smell. The touch of her fingers on my bark.

It was her face that intrigued me most. Her skin was so white, it seemed transparent, and it was as soft and smooth to the touch as the petals of a rose. She smelled like lilacs, even though the lilac season was over, and there were dark half-moons of fatigue under her still frightened eyes.

I wondered if she could feel my trunk, my bark, my twigs, my leaves, and my branches…every part of me…trembling with emotion. I loved the honor of sheltering this fragile, imperiled creature, and I felt ennobled by the groundskeeper’s trust.

Alonso did not come back for twenty minutes. When he did, he strode forward, lifted Pepita out of my arms, and gently lowered her to earth.

There were two of them? He growled out the question.

The woman nodded.

One short? Yellow windbreaker? The other tall? White T-shirt and red baseball cap?

She nodded again.

I got ‘em, he said grimly. Turned them over to the police. He held out a small shoulder bag, no bigger than a folded handkerchief.

Yours? he asked.

Yes.

He gave it to her.

Then the architect, arborist, and guardian angel of my park tilted his head to one side, much like a faithful and loving dog, and said, Alonso Hannah. That’s my name. This is my park.

He waited.

The woman hesitated, as though considering her options. Finally, she said, My name is Pepita St. Claire.

And the one-armed giant who had begun the day as the Samuel Swerling Park groundskeeper and