Recreating. Almost a half century later.
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| The corner |
Magical sky above as I arrive in Bushwick, Brooklyn - where I lived between the ages of 10 and 15. Give or take. Need to check dates.
Click on images to enlarge.
In my revisits to the city over the decades I have not taken the time to get to this neighboorhood and walk the streets again. I decided it was time and rode my bicycle the three miles there.
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| 243 Covert Street |
It began in 5th grade - my mother scooped me up from school - St. George Ukrainian Catholic on 6th Street in Manhattan (we lived on Avenue C) - and took me to our new home at 243 Covert Street. When I asked her when my father would be getting there from work, she informed me that he wasn't moving with us.
This was the neighborhood I "grew up" in. I started spending all my free time in the streets. A big change from the Lower East Side, which was mostly Eastern European immigrants, I now had black, Puerto Rican, and Italian friends.
I loved to play ball games. Stick ball was my favorite. Also curb ball and handball - the latter which we played off the bakery wall on the corner (now a Chinese Restaurant) - until the owners came out, again and again, to complain about the sound inside the store.
There was also tag, and hide and seek and ringolevio.
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| Home plate. |
These streets are where I recieved my Pavlovian training to respond by salivating at the Mister Softee Ice Cream jingle.
This is the neighborhood where I first discovered sexuality.
I think this is the house where Sarah lived - a girl I "asked out" to go to a movies, but the plans fell apart and so did the potential romance. She wore glasses.
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| Maybe Sarah's house. |
When we first moved here I went to school in the neighborhood for a half year - Fourteen Holy Martyrs (lovely name for a grammar school)(I got my first black eye there) - then went back to going to school in Manhattan on the subway every day, which continued through high school.
These hours of transportation is where I truly learned to love reading books.
Every morning I walked to the corner of Wilson Avenue, then the four blocks to the Wilson Street subway station, now on the L line. into Manhattan.
I decided to follow some memories, with something akin to instinct, towards the movie theater I used to go to. Following the vague nudges from my internal compass I made it to Myrtle and Wycoff Avenues, with brain cells reactivating as I went along, leading me towards the ancient destination.
Walking my bike through a neighborhood where the awnings and facades reflected a disposable cheapness. while below were obvious signs of an older, more solicitous architecture.
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| Myrtle Avenue |
And then - it was still there! - about a mile from my then home - obviuosly not functioning for some time, the old stone letters at the top reminded me of the name I would never have regained through memory - Ridgewood Theaterhttp://queenscrap.blogspot.com/2010/08/ridgewood-theatre-auditorium-cannot-be.html. And upon looking it up while I write this I realize that I had crossed over from Brooklyn to Queens.
One never knows where and how the tempests will toss one. This trip involved a bad bike tire which added up to three flats, and lots of frustration and walking along the way - and about fifty dollars in total repairs - but it was magical through and through.
There were many times along the way that tears came to my eyes as the only person with whom I could truly share many of these places which I was visiting was my mother, and there was no way to reach her and share the wonders any more - she died in 2007.
One of my last memories of my neighborhood in Bushwick was being summoned to come home early from high school - I knew something very serious must have been the reason - walking down my block, which in memory was particularly grey and the trees hanging heavy, to be told that my father had died during the night, a heart attach at 52. He lived in Manhattan and I saw him regularly.
The tempests go on - tossing us towards sorrow, tossing us towards joy.
Hark - a joyous one approaches! - it threatens to toss me into the middle of the desert in Nevada!
And another, sometime later, hopefully, will toss me back to Brooklyn on 9 September 2010, by then home again for over two months.
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