I sit on a slab of cold limestone under a miniature ponderosa pine, its trunk knurled with scabs of reddish bark that invite you to pull one off, its needles, like course hair a foot long clumped along the branches. Beyond the tree, which grows out of a sandy walkway, a series of five pedestals made of concrete blocks and painted a glossy gray stand mute, seemingly an intrusion from under ground in their regimented line. But beyond that, a lamp post, black cast iron rising to a yellow glass dome that looks like it remains from the 1880s, but of course it is new. It only looks old. The miniature ponderosa pines are sprinkled through a series of sandy paths, creating a miniature forest, broken by gray cement block pedestals and London-like lamp posts reminding me of Dickens, or perhaps the lamp in the woods in the enchanted land of Narnia. From where I sit, the paths diverge in three directions, but they are not like the paths of a natural wood: there are concrete borders, and the paths narrow and then expand within the boundaries of these concrete borders.

Trolley bells clang again and the airy trolley hurries buy from left to right behind me. A hand held whistle blows, the sound of the parking attendant in the circle drive of the glass-clad Marriot, shaped like two large glass sails bellowing in the Southern California breeze, and the voice, words unheard, hails the assistance of another parking attendant.

The flesh-colored paths, bordered by light gray concrete, penetrate a miniature mountain range, mounds covered with plush fescue, dew sparkling from the green blades as the sun ascends from the right. As I look down the path in front of me, I see six of these miniature mountains, three on each side of the path, the path interrupted by some twenty miniature ponderosas and three sets of gray block pedestal walls. I see a yellow taxi cross the open space at the end of the path, the billboard on its roof white with large black lettering. It intrudes on the fantasy world of miniature forest and mountains.

A sea gull calls as it flies with deliberate and easy strokes over the forest. A motor cycle engine, loud and bubbling breaks the dying sounds of background traffic noise and then silence, except for the sound of water falling on water, the sprinkling poles standing in a blue reflecting pool, like a forest of corroding pipes fifteen feet tall jutting from the floor of the pool, each with a rotating sprinkle of four or five lines of water that change into a sheet of drops falling on the dark blue surface, changing its color to a lighter blue and roughing up its smooth surface.

Bells at the intersection again, this time accompanied by the deep, body resonating rumble of large diesel engines, the clarion corded sound of an Amtrak train's silver trumpets, and a faint whiff of diesel fuel exhaust. This is no fantasy land trolley, but then its is gone, and the gentle sound of falling water returns, accompanied by the squeaking call of the sea gulls, the chirp of a brown-winged sparrow.

I wonder how it looks from above. These green miniature mountains, perfect circles, surrounded by concrete boundaries, must look like cookie-cutter circles iced with green icing cut out of a golden dough that makes up the paths where I sit, and to one side a blue half circle of the reflecting pool with a rectangular patch of pipes and falling water describing a watery forest of falling water leaves.

But here I sit on a cold slab of hewn limestone in a little mountained world of soft green breasts and adventuring paths filled with a forest of miniature ponderosas and broken by gray concrete block walls. I'm invited to be a child but reminded that it is all artificial, that the real world of attendant whistles, of squeaking brakes, of yellow taxis and Amtrak trains is the real world. The sun has risen, the sky, a roof above me, early on a darkling dawn and then a peach-colored yellow, is now an azure dome with white fleecy clouds. Morning has broken, and the trash truck with its big yellow, over-the-cab arm rumbles by on its mission of picking up after the real world.

reference:http://www.engl.niu.edu/wac/childpar.html