Procreation is not a virtue

Homeless young people congregating in park

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Once during a back and forth in the comments section of an environmentally oriented website, another commenter accused me of being heedless of the environment and contributing to overpopulation, because I have four children.

It was a ridiculous thing to say and not only because my kids comprise two stepchildren and two children Bella and I adopted.

Kamala Harris has also been criticized in recent weeks, by JD Vance and Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others, for the makeup of her family. Harris has two stepchildren but no biological children, and that, according to her critics, means her experience is somehow emotionally lacking and, in Vance’s conception, that she doesn’t have “as much of an investment in the future of this country.”

I can’t imagine setting up a “biological kids only” standard is good politics, as it offends all sorts of people whose hearts have been opened by children who do not share their genes.

Biological connection doesn’t make you a good mother or father, nor does its absence make you a bad one.

Becoming a step- or adoptive parent requires intention and motivation. Becoming a biological parent is far easier. As numberless men and women have discovered, it can even be accomplished by mistake.

For me, parenthood has been full of challenge and wonder. But many paths can lead to rich and fulfilling lives, with children or without.

A further argument from Vance and others is that we have a duty to our country and even to our species to reproduce. Maybe — if we had just experienced a cataclysm that wiped out 90 percent of the human race. But the world now has no shortage of human beings.

We can always use more good people, however, and we get them from responsible and loving parents. Whether they look like their kids doesn’t matter.

Photos of our kids adorn the wall next to the staircase in our house.

Hanging out

A question has arisen this summer, more pressingly than in previous years because of the larger crowd that has been showing up in City Park and hanging out for hours, talking and eating, walking from spot to spot, vaping and smoking pot and perching on benches with backpacks and sometimes towing suitcases or carts: What should city officials do, if anything, about the young people who appear to have nowhere else to go and who spend all day in the park?

I don’t have an answer. I have heard that city officials are working on some sort of official response. I’ve spoken with Dan Burke, the head of the business improvement district, which maintains the park (and does a fantastic job), and with Kathy Naftali, the librarian at Crandall Public Library, where those who spend their days in the park also go for the comfortable chairs and the bathroom. I’ve spoken with other citizens who walk through the park and have noticed the 10 to 20 folks lounging together on the lawn and benches, but no one has a clear strategy or even a clear idea whether a strategy is needed.

One older woman I spoke with said she has friends who are afraid to walk through the park now. She suggested the park should be policed more strictly, with enforcement of no-smoking and no-littering rules.

Mostly, what the people hanging out in the park are doing is legal. But their appearance can be sloppy — occasionally, a young man will take his shirt off — and people like me, who have spent most of their lives dressing for work and going to work, can have a grumpy reaction to their apparent purposelessness.

If you talk to some of these folks, as I did on Friday, you understand quickly that there are reasons why they’re not in a cubicle somewhere, accomplishing something.

Amanda Bushey, left, who is 31, sits with Jennifer Tefoe, middle, who is 30, and Emily, who didn’t want to be identified, on Friday in City Park.

Three young women I spoke with said they find various places to sleep (they’re not allowed to spend the night in the park), including a car, a tent in Cole’s Woods and an abandoned house. One said she’d been pregnant recently but an abusive boyfriend “stamped on my stomach,” and she lost the baby.

“I had a boyfriend, he went to jail and I broke up with him,” said Emily.

She had been homeless for seven months, she said, and had found shelter in “bandos” (abandoned houses) and garages. Over the winter, she and her boyfriend spent four months in an abandoned house in Queensbury, she said — “then it got posted.”

Amanda Bushey, who is 31 and from the Glens Falls area, said she has been hanging out in City Park off and on for about 15 years. She has found help at the behavioral health unit at Glens Falls Hospital, she said, where she is seeing a “wonderful therapist” and getting prescriptions for medication.

“I have an actual diagnosis,” she said, smiling.

Jennifer Tefoe, who is 30, said she came to Glens Falls from Ticonderoga two weeks ago and is returning soon to Ti to live with her mother.

They help each other, they said, and they have found — “for some weird reason” — that local teens who aren’t homeless occasionally come to the park and hang out with them.

“Homeless is scary,” Emily said.

This young man was napping on a bench in City Park earlier in the week.

Ballooning

We went to the great balloon festival on Thursday in Crandall Park, and I have never seen it so packed. Here is a short video of the crowd:

And here is a video of the same field the next day. What a fantastic job someone did of cleaning up what I’m sure must have been a mess.

The balloon festival continues to be one of the most fun and magical events I’ve ever attended. The way people stream into the park from all sides and kids run around and families arrange themselves on the lawn — no ticketing, no one telling you what to do — and the dragon roars of the propane burners, spewing flame into the big envelopes of the balloons.

Balloons begin to lift off Thursday in Crandall Park as flame from propane burners fills them with hot air.

Turtles

Elsewhere in Crandall Park this week, we spotted three turtles perched on logs in the pond. Can you see them?

Three turtles hang out on logs in the pond at Crandall Park earlier this week.

Also, during a walk on the Feeder Canal trail, heading back from the dam, we came across this little snapping turtle. I don’t know how old it is, but I’ve never seen one so small.

Ringo, too, was fascinated by the little black snapping turtle we encountered on the Feeder Canal trail. After a few sniffs, he and the turtle left each other alone.