At the risk of sounding arrogant, I'm used to larger parks-- parks that offer baseball, soccer, and…read morefootball fields, hiking and running trails, hockey rinks, picnic tables, outdoor grills, facilities for large groups to gather indoors, water fountains, bathrooms, ample parking lots, even...disc golf. Sunset Memorial Park is miniscule in comparison to them, and it offers...well, benches to sit down on and enjoy the scenery that presents itself.
Just to be clear, I don't mean that as a dig. I like the park, although I've never spent a lot of time in it.
And...at the risk of belaboring my life story...I had virtually no familiarity with Rutherford at all...its parks or anything else about it...until my birth mother located me (with the somewhat reluctant assistance of the Lutheran Agency through which I had been adopted many moons earlier) and reached out approximately 20 years ago. At that time, my maternal grandmother resided not far from where Sunset Memorial Park is located. This is the area where my birth mother spent her teenage years (she spent her childhood years in Hoboken). It's where I first met my genetic relatives, who were...thankfully...warm and welcoming.
I never felt I was replacing the family I was raised with...they were, and always will be, my family...but I have expanded that family, and consider my relatives...both genetic and adopted...family.
My late grandmother loved this park and would come here often up until her final years, when her son (my uncle) moved her down to North Carolina and out of the old family residence.
I've only actually walked in the park once or twice, and found it pleasant enough, but I pass here often when driving to visit my birth mother. She tells a story of how her father, a decent guy by all accounts, but a bit of the tyrannical puritan (he died years before my reunion with my genetic family took place, and I unfortunately was never able to meet him, but I think, if I can play the dime store psychiatrist about someone whose genes I carry but never actually encountered face to face, he was probably somewhat conflicted emotionally and perhaps psychologically; his father's family were wealthy Protestants originally from New Hampshire, which certainly clashed...religiously and culturally...with his mother's Brooklyn working-class Irish Catholicism; he insisted his children be raised as Congregationalists, but when he had had a few beers and was feeling no pain, he was not adverse to singing "Danny Boy" and other Irish classics, often in the company of his maternal Irish relatives, whom he revered), came upon a teenaged couple "making out" in the park and brusquely told them to move on and to take it somewhere else. My birth mother was mortified and embarrassed. (It's ironic, perhaps, that I was "conceived" in a house just a stone's throw from the park and born to teenagers who were also "making out.")
In addition to being small, the park is sort of on a tilt, so when you walk around it, you're almost walking at an angle. It's well cared for and landscaped with thorough professionalism (U.S. Veterans have worked together to revitalize it), and it does have more than enough benches for sitting. Is there much to see from those benches? Well...Rutherford is a nice Bergen County town. It seems to have aged well. The houses surrounding the park are not new, but they're well kept, and there are abundant trees in the vicinity (Rutherford is often referred to as "the borough of trees"). Of course, not far distant, across the polluted Passaic River (with numerous homeless people living on its banks), is the grimy, often dangerous, always depressing city of Passaic. As invariably happens in life, grim reality is never far off from intruding upon whatever peace and restorative tranquility we can temporarily find for ourselves.
But, for all that, it's still a nice place to sit, reflect, meditate, and contemplate life in all its ramifications and complexities. To relax, maybe have a conversation with a friend, or friends. It's definitely an old park (according to a marker set up near its perimeter, it was established in 1905 on land donated by Henry Jackson, whoever he was), so it has that certain timeless quality and sense of history about it.
Just don't expect to play any disc golf while you're here.
