Of Gardens: Selected Essays

Epilogue. A Winter Garden of Yellow

0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 328 8/10/10 1:45:08 PM 329 O A Winter Garden of Yellow On drizzly winter mornings, I often stand at a corner window, hot mug of milk in hand, looking down on Park Avenue. The moment has to be right, a little after eight o’clock. Suddenly, moving slowly up and down both sides of the center islands, school buses and taxis fill the slick dark avenue with chrome-yellow shapes that gleam in the rain. I move away for an instant, then, when I look again, this world in a mist seems transformed into a stream in an old Kyoto garden where golden carp weave in and out of dark waters, their backs glistening as they turn. In another moment, the children have disembarked at the school next door, and Park Avenue is gray again. During the drab months between holiday lights and the first blooms of spring, what sparks the gloom of cityscapes is the winter garden of industrial colors—particularly, in New York, yellow. Invented at an educators’ conference in 1939, “National School Bus Yellow” was selected for its high visibility that led to safety. Although New York City’s taxi fleets originally maintained their own company colors, by the 1970s yellow became the industry’s standard for medallion cabs. Seen from above, a single yellow cab gliding through the snow in Central Park carries with it a world of warmth. In London, red is dominant thanks to the omnibuses, a few old telephone booths, and pillar boxes of the Royal Mail. But it was not always so. In Oscar Wilde’s poem “Symphony in Yellow,” he wrote how “An omnibus across the bridge / Crawls like a yellow butterfly . . . / And, like a yellow silken scarf, / The thick fog hangs along the quay.” Even in rural Vermont, the poet Sydney Facing page: William John Kennedy, Taxi in wintry Central Park, New York. 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 329 8/10/10 1:45:08 PM e p i l o g u e 330 • • • • • • Lea observed in “Annual Report”: “In mind, the school bus was a mobile jonquil, / giant bud in February’s gray.” The once stylish yellow rain slicker also brings a sunny presence to New York’s sidewalks—the patrol officer at the school swings in hers butterfly-like as the schoolchildren cross the street. At a women’s college in the 1950s, slickered students crossing the commons in winter looked like daffodils bobbing on the horizon. In his book For the Union Dead, Robert Lowell described the progression through the rain of two cops on horseback in “their oilskins yellow as forsythia.” Frequently in the city I catch special glimpses of winter yellow. Once, in a dusk magically glowing, I watched a school of rush-hour taxis through the chain-link draperies at the Four Seasons, just off Park Avenue, where I was waiting for a friend. This calls to mind an old Chinese scroll with golden fish rising through swirls of water, and an obi sash embroidered with carp darting through glinting waves. Not far away, at the Asia Society, a porcelain jar from the Ming period, decorated with eight goldfish swimming through aquatic plants, was captioned “a symbol of harmony.” Matisse captured the look in a maquette for a stained-glass window called Chinese Fish made with orange yellow cutouts swimming across a grid. This is the height of the season, a cold gray city adorned with the glow of metallic yellow, as if a goldfinch had alighted on the bough of a wintry tree. Only weeks away, nature’s colors will take over again—red tulips and pink cherry blossoms on Park Avenue’s islands—and this poignant yellow of winter again will fade. New York Times, February 27, 1995 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 330 8/10/10 1:45:08 PM • • • • • • 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 331 8/10/10 1:45:08 PM ...