This coming week, I am returning to my old hometown, Park Slope, to discuss the publication of my short story collection, Home Front.
It will be my first visit to Park Slope since, let’s see, December 2010 — and that was a quick pass-through, as I returned a U-Haul truck on that snowy Christmas Day after helping move my son to his new home, in North Brooklyn.
It feels strange. I still consider myself “untimely ripped” from the comfort zone of my 25-year life in Brooklyn — although I suppose it’s ridiculous to think that way after living in one place for a quarter century.
Yet, on the other hand, and as regular readers of The Real New Yorkers know, the move from Brooklyn was not without trauma. Lots of ambivalence there. First, plainly, baldly, I no longer fit in. The neighborhood was a fast-changing neighborhood: it went from cozy, cultural, post hippie-ish haven, to an uber-affluent, very young, transient, tourist destination in the blink of a BMW.
Second: jeez, after 25 years, enough was enough. Time for new horizons, right?
And yet. This was where my marriage really took root. This is where I raised my son, and where my family developed deep affiliations at school, temple, 78th Pct. Little League. I was the mayor of Park Slope. We walked the streets, roamed every corner of the Park, did the stop-‘n’-chat with myriad neighbors. The connective tissue grew stronger by the year. It’s called “making a life.”
Then, bam, we were empty nesters. Bam, we felt out-of-place. Bam, we visited and fell in love with a new area of New York. We pulled the trigger, did the move, and it all worked out.
On paper.
In our hearts, we miss Brooklyn. Actually? Truth be told? I guess what we really miss is “who-we-were-and-what-we-did-when-we-were-younger-and-lived-in-Brooklyn.” Because we moved on. We’re not those people anymore. And Brooklyn moved on, too. Brooklyn is not the same as it was, even as recently as 2010, when we moved that scorching summer — the hottest summer in the city’s history, as Real New Yorkers know. The summer my son returned from a year-long, after college, stint in Montana helping the underprivileged, to plan his life and, ultimately, move out on his own, back to Brooklyn.
And it was the summer my trusty dog of nearly 12 years died, mere weeks before our move. No, he never made it to the new place. He would have loved Van Cortlandt Park, and the wooded areas near the Hudson River, just as much, if not more, than the Great Meadow and the Nethermead and the little back paths that criss-crossed Prospect Park. But the life of a dog is painfully compressed, and we are left to survive, and remember.
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And so, next week I will end my self-imposed exile, “lay my head” on Park Slope’s “pillow,” and savor whatever is left of “the good times.”
After my meeting on Garfield, I’ll visit 826nyc, where every Thursday I was a volunteer tutor for little kids, from the very first day it opened, in 2004, and see if any of the people I knew are still there. I bet not.
I’ll pass by the Park, for sure, and revisit the little corner of the meadow where my dog, Gengy, and I played “stick,” day after day, year after year, in summer’s heat and winter’s cold, for he was a Boxer, and Boxer’s must run every day, and hard.
I’ll pass by Berkeley Carroll and see an entirely new cast of kids wreacking havoc and acting “cool.” We were never poor, for sure, but these kids, I bet, come from real privilege and are probably loaded with the sense of entitlement we came to abhor in our newer Park Slope neighbors.
I think I’ll pass by Beth Elohim and then visit the guys at the Middle Eastern food place on Seventh Avenue. I’ll pick up some Turkish pistachios and dried apricots. I remember how after 9/11, with the neighborhood still smelling like a crematorium from the smoldering ruins just across the river, I boycotted them. Not with placards. But I just couldn’t, wouldn’t, go there — and it lasted for two years, no three, until I crawled back the summer I crushed my shoulder in a bike accident and they helped me hold the little plastic bags as I filled them with whole wheat cous cous, lentils, and dried oregano.
Aunt Suzie’s Italian restaurant went out of business, I read. And Tempo, the “grown-up” restaurant and a leader of the charge to revitalize the formerly hardscrabble Fifth Avenue, is long gone, replaced by what? A kid-friendly, overpriced pizza joint, I think I heard.
I suppose I’ll have to pass by my old apartment house. Ugh. That will be tough. I know my stomach will flip when I get there. Who will I see? Is the same super there? The same doorman? Will I see any of the neighbors that I adored? Despised? And, if I do, will they have time for a stop-‘n’-chat, or will they merely nod, smile thinly and walk on, continuing with their lives?
As I must, as well.