'Tis the season
It is suddenly, unapologetically summer in Denver. This part of the country issued a cease-and-desist on spring years ago, occasional May snowstorms and windshield-smashing hail aside. There was no adjustment period before the daily high hit the mid-90’s, and I am ill-equipped for the abrupt seasonal shift.
I have a mixed relationship with summer. I enjoy REI-sanctioned outdoor activities as much as the next middle-class white person, but I am also averse to spending too much time in the sun, lest its rays accelerate the aging of my face or encourage the ink beneath my skin to spread as it matures. Some of this is inevitable, though I try to offset the natural process as much as possible through the application of sunscreen and trying to stay in the shade.
I could hear the change before I felt it. Car windows roll down; stock sound systems crank up. Local radio stations have tripled their play of Sublime’s song catalog and at least once a day I hear 311’s “Amber” passing through the neighborhood. Sunshine and high temperatures aside, the change has been most noticeable at the park. There the volume increases exponentially, both in the number of bodies present and the noise they create.
The park in question was not always park. It was Denver’s first cemetery: Mount Prospect, a religiously and ethnically segregated burial ground that had fallen out of favor and into disrepair by the 1880’s. Hoping to lure wealthy residents back into the area, real estate developers began a lobby to convert the abandoned cemetery into a park. Following some very sketchy business practices by a local undertaker that ultimately led to his dismissal, most of the graves were emptied and the ground was graded and leveled, its grounds renamed after a local pioneer shortly after his death.
Just shy of a hundred years later, Cheesman Park was one of the best anonymous gay hookup spots in the city. While local police and park rangers have worked very hard to erase this piece of the park’s history, some remnants still linger – mostly in the form of the aging queens caterwauling show tunes on the shady side of the park’s pavilion. A handful of the old dears take up residence there as the temperature rises, spending their days on the rows of green metal benches facing each other from opposite edges of the sidewalk. You don’t have to see them to be aware of their presence; these girls get messy, their revelry quite raucous by early afternoon. Off-key Broadway renditions blend with exacting put-downs projected at a volume that practically demands I wonder which “peasant bitch” they’re talking about; stay-at-home moms trying to jog off post-baby bodies often look shocked as they pilot strollers around the park’s perimeter. I wonder how they would react if they knew the man doing laps in his RAV-4 is not an ambassador for house music, but waiting for cruising hours to start. Cheesman remains the best place to observe how old and new Denver overlap but do not interact.
Sundown cues the park’s daily congregants to peel off from the group, each carrying a Bluetooth speaker bumping dance singles of summers past as they move, slowly, towards home. I’ve yet to determine if their assemblage is forged by friendship or merely commonalities; it seems a good deal of adult relationships are formed based on perceived similarities rather than shared affection, though I could be reading that wrong. I am a bit of a hermit, after all.
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Aside from all that…
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