The Zucchinis by the Escalator

the mid-month post

For exactly two years, a decade ago, I took a particular escalator down into a particular train station. My morning commute went like this: First, I walked Mabel the half mile from our apartment to her preschool. Next, after dropping her off, I walked through Civic Center Plaza and then through United Nations Plaza. Then I arrived at the escalator and went down it.

At the bottom of the escalator was a walkway into the station with a waist-high concrete ledge running along one side. Occasionally a person would be sitting on the ledge or leaning up against it. Nearly always various flotsam—fast food wrappers, paper coffee cups, dead leaves—would be scattered along the ledge.

One day, as I neared the bottom of the escalator, I saw two enormous zucchinis on the ledge. Each one twice or three times as large as a supermarket zucchini. The kind of zucchini that your neighbor who has a vegetable garden leaves on the vine for way too long and then gives to you and you have no idea what to do with. One right near the base of the escalator, another a few feet further on. Just sitting there. No one around to claim ownership.

It’s worth noting that this did not happen on the day of the nearby farmer’s market, nor the day after the farmer’s market day. Nope, this was an entirely random vegetable occurrence. Just one of those hilarious weird little gifts of propinquity that the city gives you from time to time, if you’re willing to take receipt of them.

I grinned so wide I must surely have raised a few eyebrows among the people coming up the escalator on the other side. I almost laughed out loud. It was so absurd, so mysterious, but at the same time so commonplace, so grubby.  

The jolt of whimsy and pleasure I was experiencing in that moment was being caused by the act of seeing. By visual stimuli going in through my eyeballs. A sight made up of the humblest parts: creaky dirty transit corridor + oversized subpar produce.

Those veggies were put there by human hands for some reason of a person’s own, a reason I could guess at but never fathom, a reason which most assuredly had nothing whatsoever to do with affording me enjoyment. And yet here I was enjoying the hell out of it.

The world is full of these pleasures. Full to bursting. Orchestrated by people (sometimes intentionally but much more often not); orchestrated by nature; orchestrated by time and space and luck and coincidence and the truly random nature of chance. Made from the most humble parts. Made into art, into joy, into magic.