September 10, 2009: Monday in the Park With Taylor

In the autumn of 1999, we took the Hanson tour of New York City. We pressed our noses to the glass in the lobby of the Beacon Theater and lolled outside the Trump Towers Hotel and meandered around Central Park, just looking. To see the places that they saw and stand in the places where they stood in some dim hope of capturing a piece of them, of conjuring them out of thin air. And who knew? Maybe they really would be standing there when we arrived, recreating that photo shoot in Seventeen or having lunch and Planet Hollywood. It was New York City. Anything was possible.

To grow up in the suburbs north of Boston, as we did, and to be a Hanson fan, was to dream about what was happening in New York City. While you were taking the SAT, a bunch of other girls were waiting outside a hotel to talk to Taylor for the third time that day. While you were helping your mom carry bags of groceries into the house, some other girls were talking their way into the studio at TRL. While we watched and re-watched our DVDs and set the timers on our VCRs to capture late-night talk show appearances, other girls were there, in line, on the sidewalk. It drove us crazy, but mostly it filled us with dreamy longing.

We didn't want to be the New York Girls, necessarily. (There was something a little weird and dangerous about them. What kind of girls, after all, were allowed to skip that much school? To hang around for hours and hours? To appear so many times and in so many places—like magic, defying the laws of time and logic—that even their names and personalities were familiar to us?) But we wanted to know what they knew, to get close, and to answer the only question that ever mattered: What are Isaac, Taylor, and Zac really (really) like? We thought they knew. Or maybe we just thought they knew more than we knew. Even that was something.

So when we came to visit New York City on those occasional, incredible weekend trips—so close and yet so heartbreakingly far from Boston—we tried to crack all the codes of what it meant to be a New York Girl, to see all the places that mattered.

In Central Park, the leaves fell around us while we squinted at the black boulders, trying to decipher them as though, through some kind of amazing rock phrenology, they could yield secrets about our favorite band. Did Taylor stand on this one? Or on this one? Did he hang upside down from that tree—the one that crooks right in a very particular place. We had seen the photos in magazines. They had really stood there. Surely, if we were standing where they stood, they weren't so very far away from us.

To write this now, as someone who's lived in New York City for six years, it feels as though I'm talking about the pebbly surface of some foreign planet. Visiting Central Park, it's clear that all of the rocks look mostly alike, that all of our hunting for that rock—Taylor's rock—was futile and silly. We just wanted to say that we'd found it. The sleepy-eyed kids who sit in the smeary window at the Beacon Theater box office would have no idea who Hanson was if they were playing there that night, and Hanson themselves probably only visited Planet Hollywood once, and for a short time. My New York City, now, isn't the New York City I was searching for as a teenager. I'm not sure it ever existed.

You can imagine my surprise, then—my complete, mind-shattering surprise—when what happened happened. On a Monday holiday in 2009, while I was taking a lazy walk through Central Park.

I was with friends who were visiting from out of town, and if you know me, you know that I have a standard Central Park tour. Bethesda Terrace and the angel, the Boat House, the Alice statue. But instead of walking over to the East Side, my friends wanted to walk through The Ramble and up to Belvedere Castle—something that I almost never do. (When I first moved to New York, I got lost in The Ramble—the most heavily wooded, secluded part of Central Park—at sunset. I found my way out, but I spent enough time walking in circles and avoiding eye contact with enough sketchy men to sufficiently scare myself into sticking with brighter paths.) But I was with friends, so we went.

Walking down from the castle, I spotted someone standing farther along down the path. And the first tipoff was that he was wearing weird pants. Keep in mind that people wearing weird pants—and shirts, and fedoras, and earmuffs—is a fairly ordinary thing in New York City. To live here is to love the endless fashion show that parades by your door each day—boys in skirts, girls with their names shaved into the sides of their hair, injury-causing short-shorts, Uggs. It's fun to watch. But here's what I noticed about these pants: They were terrifyingly tight and, if my eyes weren't deceiving me, they were being worn by someone who wasn't female. Or maybe they were female? From that distance, it was just hard to tell.

As we got closer, I continued to inspect. At some point, long before it could match words to the ideas, my brain started to understand. Even with his back to me, he was so familiar. The way he stood, balanced on one leg. The head of shaggy hair. This is how well we all know him, how imprinted into the blueprints of our collective conscience is Jordan Taylor Hanson. It's as though that 18-year-old part of me is, and has always been waiting. And looking. Always looking. To catch a glimpse of him in a crowd. To run into him at the drug store. I knew who he was, for sure, before I even saw his face, but when I saw it, my reflex was so natural. And so insane.

I opened my mouth to say hello to him.

I did this not as though he was Taylor Hanson, but as though he was someone I know. As though I'd run into a friend in Central Park. As though he would smile and say, “Hey Laura, what are you doing out here today?”

I closed my mouth, remembering that Taylor doesn't actually know who I am, that just because this person rearranged the molecules of my youth, that doesn't mean that I did his.

And for an instant, I wondered if I'd dreamed him up. If so many years of searching had finally triggered it, a sublime hallucination wearing a grandpa sweater and three days of stubble. But then I checked the details around him and I knew I was wide awake, and so was he. Natalie stood beside him, wrangling a baby into the stroller. Above the path, a little boy and a little girl raced around on top of the rocks, chasing each other. Taylor shouted for them to please come down. No one recognized them. They were like any slightly harried family in the park that day. Having their outing. Enjoying the last fleeting moments of summer. To disturb that, even with just a hello, would have been tragic. And maybe too, I was worried about breaking the spell. A word between us and he might dissipate to dust. Or worse, maybe he'd be a lot more boring than I'd expect.

I kept walking. When I was well out of earshot, I sent messages to my girls back at home, the ones who helped me search for him that day so long ago, as the leaves fell on our heads, as we tried to tell one rock from another. All I told them was that I'd seen him. Yes, really him. With his family.

There was so much I didn't need to say, that they would just know, because they were there: How it was exactly as we'd imagined. He was just where we thought he'd be. Under the trees, by the big black boulders. He wasn't standing on top of them, but it didn't matter. Maybe that was a sign we missed, or a dream we'd misinterpreted, a thing we couldn't even begin to imagine when we were 16 and 17 and 18. That the person on the rock was a little girl in a pink tulle ballerina skirt with enormous plastic jewels stuck all over, that the flash of pale hair against the black—wasn't his at all.

Labels: central park, taylor

Posted by Laura Motta | 10:31 AM | 15 comments | link |