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Bruce’s Garden, located at the eastern most side of Isham Park in Inwood, commemorates the life of Port Authority police officer Bruce Reynolds. It’s also a place to reflect and find solace.
Whenever people learn that the day of my birthday in conversation, there is always a pause. It is followed often by a slight groan, sometimes accompanied by an apology.
“Oh that must be terrible,” some people say.
What they don’t know, and what I have grown to learn through the years, is that it isn’t so terrible, and that as the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks nears, I too will be a year older on the day which our nation will forever continue to commemorate.
Like everyone I know, I’ll always remember what I was doing that day. I’ll remember the confusion I felt as I walked home from school while my City drowned in chaos, and my still not being completely aware of the events that had unfolded. I’ll remember my mother’s attempt at explaining what was happening and her telling me how lucky we were.
It was a birthday that I never forgot, and since then celebration has always been a hard thing to understand.
Birthdays are often no small affair in Latino households and mine isn’t the exception. Every year my mother wants to celebrate, something I had mixed feelings about for a long time, but have grown to understand and cherish. After all, a birthday can be just a birthday, another day, and another calendar check, making us older and hopefully wiser.
But this week I made a trip to Bruce’s Garden in Inwood. The first time I ever set foot in the garden was not too long ago, late last winter in my explorations of the neighborhood.
At the time, the garden, covered by last year’s unforgiving snow, did not show many signs of life. But all that changed this spring with the blooming of Inwood’s emblematic flowers and the greening of the trees. And perhaps that’s what birthdays should be like, our own personal New Year celebration, a spring of sorts where we get to start from scratch, sort of.
The garden, is a celebration and testament to Port Authority police officer and Inwood native Bruce Reynolds, who rushed to the site of the attacks on that fateful day and perished in his effort to save others.
Bruce’s Garden is special not because it commemorates the passing of one of ours, but because as a child Reynolds, with the help of his father, began tending to and creating what slowly developed into a community garden.
Every year, with the switch of the seasons and the change of the time, the garden will go through its natural cycles. The flowers bloom, but eventually, leaves dry and the garden dies in the cold of winter. Every spring, the volunteers and the diligent hands of Inwood residents who are caretakers of the garden will help to keep it alive and beautiful, like parents, and like my mother does with my birthday every year despite my confused emotions around celebration.
After all these years, she will continue to do the same thing, cook enough food for an army and invite the entire family to her house. There’ll be music, and laughter, with people who to me matter most.
I never knew Bruce Reynolds. But something tells me that he would have continued to father that garden and cherish its existence. On September 11, the tenth anniversary of the attacks, and my birthday, I will cherish having another year to start, and remember the ones who aren’t here to get through the winter to see the spring.
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