Parker’s Piece
Almost exactly a year ago, the world as we know it fell to pieces. I was in a cozy flat on a lane just off of Parker’s Piece, gathering with my church friends for what turned out to be the last time under normal circumstances, when the global response to the looming pandemic began to accelerate at whiplash speed. Earlier that morning President Trump had announced the closure of the US border to Europe and my sister had been called home from her internship in Spain. I was still imagining a modified version of the life I was used to: staying in Cambridge, probably working from home for a little while, still going to church on Sundays, gathering in some form in this small flat every week with our young adult church group. But when I got there on March 12, I learned that the older missionary couple who had just arrived a few days earlier to fill the role of young adult support in the congregation, living in the church-rented flat and hosting our gatherings, had been called home. They had 24 hours to pack and fly out. Later that night, all church gatherings were cancelled for the foreseeable future. So we ate our last weekly dinner and Jenny played the banjo and we said goodbye to our friends, bracing ourselves for the changed world.
Since that day, I’ve only been through Parker’s Piece a handful of times. But until that day, Parker’s Piece was my stomping ground. The big green square is just around the corner from my department, and I regularly cycled past it at the end of the workday on my way to the missionaries’ flat for the gatherings I helped to organize. On Sunday evenings I walked in the dark along one diagonal of the X-shaped path across the park, cello on my back, on the way to orchestra rehearsals. My lab group often visited one of the pubs on Regent Street backing on to the green. If I took the National Express bus to or from the airport, or the X5 to Oxford, the closest stop was on Parkside, under the long row of lime trees that are the noblest feature of the park. When the evenings were light enough, our church group sometimes played ultimate frisbee or, once, cricket (an educational experience for the Americans among us; some passing Brits watched our attempt rather critically). Around pre-pandemic Christmastime, a winter fair complete with spinning rides and a small ice rink would pop up. (My church friends and I visited once, but I was the only one who opted to skate, and meanwhile, one friend had an existential crisis on the spinny ride.)
Ice rink 
Winter fair 
Cricket with skeptical Brits observing
Like Jesus Green, Parker’s Piece is a place to bask in community energy. People are almost always streaming along the crossing paths. During the pandemic outside of lockdown, I’ve seen zumba classes and local sports teams practicing. Pre-lockdown there was always at least one game of soccer/football going on somewhere on the open expanse of Parker’s Piece. This is especially fitting: Parker’s Piece is popularly called the birthplace of the rules of Association Football in 1863, i.e., the official origin of modern soccer. A timeline: Parker was a cook at Trinity College who leased the land from the college in the 1500s. The ownership transferred to the town of Cambridge in 1613. Cattle, horses, and sheep grazed there until the late 1800s. In 1838, the coronation of Queen Victoria was celebrated with a feast for 15,000 people on the common.
Summer wildflower meadow 
A cast-iron Victorian lamppost stands at the center of the park where the two diagonal paths cross. The forest green lamppost, decorated with red-eyed heraldic dolphins, red-and-white flowers, and gold trim, is lovingly known as the Reality Checkpoint. Heading east past the Reality Checkpoint apparently takes you out of the Cambridge University bubble and into the non-gown part of town qualifying as the real world. For example, at one corner of newly entered Reality is the police station; beyond this is Mill Road, full of pubs and ethnic restaurants and shops. The name “Reality Checkpoint” was illicitly tagged and scrubbed off the lamppost for decades until the City Council finally gave in in 2017 and allowed it to be officially painted on. A few years later, the conceit took an especially delightful turn: the local street art group Dinky Doors created a miniature portal to Reality at the base of the lamppost.
On holiday – Please check reality yourself 
Heading towards Reality
Parker’s Piece, flat and blank as it is, may seem to be more of a canvas for people than a scenic destination in itself. I’ve found a kind of peace in its openness, though. I love looking across the green, Cambridge humming at the edges, the sky big overhead, pierced by the tall spire of Church of Our Lady and the English Martyr on one side, threaded with lime trees on the other, swirling with starling song. I remember cycling along Parker’s Piece on a particularly mundane day and being called unexpectedly into the present by the silhouettes of those trees in the dusk, suddenly utterly content to be where I was in that moment. I’ve needed this lesson more than ever over the past year, being present wherever my pandemic-time daily rhythms have landed me. Memories have their place too.
Christ’s Pieces
Down the road from Parker’s Piece is another city park, one with a bit of family lore. When I was first discussing my plans to go to Cambridge with my family, my dad had one story to tell, which essentially began with “There’s some park there called Christ’s Pieces…” The story goes, when my dad was a strapping young lad, his youth symphony went on a tour of London. His dad was a scholar of English literature and wanted to visit libraries in Cambridge, so my dad and his parents came to England early to visit. On one end of Christ’s Pieces is the Emmanuel Road bus terminal, the biggest in the city center, and this where they disembarked. My grandpa was a notorious cheapskate, so he refused to pay for a taxi. As a result, one of my dad’s most vivid memories of the trip (judging from story airtime) was schlepping his heavy, cumbersome luggage and tuxedo bag across the strangely named park. There’s even a photo (“Notice mine does not have wheels,” my dad says). When my parents visited me in Cambridge during my first year, we made sure to visit Christ’s Pieces and commemorate the occasion.
Schlepping of yore 
Dad reliving the drudgery 
Back of the Emmanuel Rd bus terminal
So, what is it with the name of this park? Just over the glass-shard-studded wall from the park is Christ’s College. As for Pieces, I can only assume that like Parker’s Piece, the word refers to parcels of land, apparently multiple at some point in the land’s history. I like to imagine that the starburst of paths splitting the modest-sized park into triangles is demarcating these “pieces,” but this is only a mark of the Victorian design bequeathed on the park when it was acquired by the city in the 1880s. Christ’s Pieces features more landscaping than Parker’s Piece, with lovely tree avenues along these paths, shrubs at the borders, and a rose garden with overarching trellis at the center in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales. On a recent visit to the park on a sunny day, every nook of the rose garden was filled with people, and a man was coaxing his white ferret out of the shrubbery. “Sola,” he called, squeaking a rubber toy and explaining to anyone within earshot, “They respond more readily to the ball—it sounds like a little animal that might be lunch. Where are you, little cat snake?” (Yes, a good place for people watching.)
The park also has ping pong tables, tennis courts, a small playground, and a bowling green next to the official City of Cambridge Bowls Club clubhouse painted its own ticklish shade of green. I once visited the park with my church friends to play ping pong, and then watched the club, almost exclusively old men, carefully tossing and knocking their multitude of bowling balls along the green (imagine bocce). The senior missionaries asked the club if we could try bowling with them sometime, and they said they would be happy to host us, but it was the end of the season. I took down an email address for next year. Then the pandemic hit.
The path between Christ’s College and Christ’s Pieces is Milton’s Walk, after the poet John Milton, who was a student at Christ’s in the 1600s. The lane ends in a little alley that conveniently (for me) spits out next door to the Cambridge Strings shop. On my way to get my cello repaired, I like to imagine the exclusive Christ’s College Fellow’s Garden on the other side of the forbidding wall, of which there are so many in Cambridge. On a recent walk I noticed an ancient tree that had prized the bricks apart long ago, with wooden planks erected around it to stop up the gap—but the tree was bulging through them too. Perhaps there’s a metaphor in there: Cambridge won’t be defined only by its colleges. For every wall, there is a common (…or a pub.)
