Strawberry Fields, Whatever

I still work in New York two days a week, all on the Upper West Side. I have a few hours to kill between my late morning and early afternoon sessions, so I usually spend them walking around Central Park. For some reason I always end up around Strawberry Fields, near the Dakota around 72nd and Central Park West. Strawberry Fields has no strawberries and isn't a field. It's just a little section of the park, a walkway really, where they've built a mosaic that says "Imagine", in honor of John Lennon.

I used to work on 70th and Broadway, and when I walked home to the east side, I would always go through Strawberry Fields, just because it was the most direct route. Apparently I have a big sign over my head, only visible to foreign tourists that says "Directions" or "Ask me to take your picture", depending on the situation. Foreign tourists love to approach me in the city because: a) I generally look like I know where I'm going and b) unlike most New Yorkers, I'm not walking 25 miles per hour while swearing into a cell phone at the top of my lungs. So I'm more approachable than your average bear.

True story, for a while I kept getting approached by elderly German tourists, speaking to me in German. I know a little German, so I would often answer back to them in German, but usually they had no idea what I was saying and would move on. This started happening to me on a weekly basis, I kid you not. Confounded, I asked a German friend, who theorized that most of the Germans approaching me were probably from the old East Germany, so they never learned to speak English in school (they learned Russian instead). She (my German friend) didn't think they thought I was German, so much as I looked approachable and looked like I might possibly speak German, which was a better risk to take than on some random Puerto Rican family walking through the park. She also said that (former) East Germans (or any Germans, for that matter) aren't used to hearing German spoken in a heavy American-English accent (I didn't think my accent was THAT bad) which probably explains why they didn't understand me. Overall, I thought her reasoning explained so much, yet so little at the same time.

Anyway, Stawberry Fields in Central Park is always covered with tourists, and I can't really figure out why. People are always getting their pictures taken in front of the mosaic, and I personally have taken at least 15 pictures of people in front of the 2'x 2' green NY parks sign that says "Strawberry Fields". John Lennon isn't buried there, and it's not even the same Strawberry Fields that the song was written about (which is somewhere in Liverpool, I think). It just happens to be sort of across the street from the building where Lennon lived and where he was shot. That's it. Nothing magical happens there, unless you count Beatles fan tourists congregating magical.

Recently they posted a sign near the mosaic that says "any items left on the mosaic will be considered abandoned, and will be removed", which is a nice way of saying "quit leaving crap here-- John's not going to get it anyway."

Standing by the mosaic, the windows of the Dakota are visible. I have to assume that Yoko Ono (who I know still lives in the Dakota) lives in one of those windows-- it would make sense that their apartment overlooked the spot where the mosaic was built, right? Apparently every year on John's birthday Yoko comes out and places flowers on the mosaic. I'm not sure when Lennon's birthday is, but I think it's in October. If I ever see her there I'm going to do my bad John Lennon accent for her and tell her that I'm Julian Lennon, John's son from his first marriage, and ask if I can borrow $100 million. All you need is love.