“There is a thread you follow, it goes among things that change…”
I am not looking at my worn and aging windows, nor my piles of things undone, taxes, household follow up, all the things that really need my attention ~ instead I am just going to wander around on this page ~ with Pandora’s Autumn Jazz station playing To You by the Gene Harris Quartet. As I listen I am filled with a rare-for-me feeling; a smiling, sighing contentment. I am looking at some exposed wood, worn chipped paint as the music and my gaze transport me to my Brooklyn New York heart. O, the deep wholeness that resides beneath that borough. With her chainlink fences, and fire escapes alongside the brownstone stoops and walkups, dotted with flowers in pots on steps with trash cans just below, or in winter as this picture suggests covered in a blanket of snow..
How/why do I find such beauty in this? Brooklyn was love at first sight. I do not know how or why, but it is so. So much soul. I feel the aliveness, the grit alongside the delicate roses or soft snow. The William Vale Hotel rises above the humble brownstones and walk ups with siding, and under it all, holding it all is the hum of creative energy. The timeless housing the fleeting. Those buildings that came before me and will out last me. Probably my offspring and theirs too and so on it goes.
This borough has seen some things. She has a chance, although just a chance of surviving late stage capitalism with its tendency to knock down memories and markers of who we were, and what has happened as if it matters not. All that matters to this young energy is NEW and MORE NEW. In its adolescent drive it would leave itself nothing to remember this moment. It doesn’t yet know how much that will matter; those markers that remind us of who, where or what we have been.
Why do I think this matters? Why is this worth your precious and scarce time to read?
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford
For me, part of the thread our poet refers to, are the images that pop to mind from my (then unmarried) daughter Kate’s apartment on 130 Nassau Avenue in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn. Her law school student brother/my son Zac visiting from Boston. And me, a newly minted fan of medicare, with more money to spend now that I am not paying for health insurance at $1500 a month! What better place to spend it than in Brooklyn with its eateries and shops. Always new ones to explore alongside old favorites. For a week at a time I got to pretend I lived there. Kate’s dry cleaner would greet me when I dropped or picked up laundry. And once he even stopped my friend, because he didn’t recognize her as she was following me a few steps after we had just picked up Kate’s cleaning. “Excuse me, Miss, that doesn’t belong to you.” I had to rescue her from his accusation of dry cleaning theft! My mother’s heart so reassured that even Kate’s dry cleaner had her back.
Fast forward to the present, when the uber drives by 130 Nassau Ave that thread of memory awakens and I once again belong to that time and those experiences. I re-appear to myself. I feel coherent. That thread is as visible as a rope or a large chain in that moment and I feel sturdy and whole. She lived here. She met, and fell in love and married here. I visited and was a part time Brooklynite here.
I know in my bones that this matters. It has always mattered but in times of intense change when the center itself does not appear to be holding, it might matter most. AND I want to be very clear, what I am referring to is quite different than going back in time. Some in my country want to return to a time when “yes, life was simpler” but it was repressive to many people, especially to all women. No, I am not nostalgic to return even 8 years ago to that part of my life nor to the 1950’s when I was born, or anything in between. I am now and will forever be on the side of evolution, progress not regression. I care to preserve memories because they render our lives a kind of coherent integrity not as a return to some better time.
Interestingly, my love is not of Manhattan but rather Brooklyn. Why? It’s aliveness and soulfulness allows its past, present and future to exist simultaneously. You might argue that is true of Manhattan but Manhattan is not the most diverse place in the world. Brooklyn is. And that diversity includes class differences, which is what Manhattan often misses, because while different classes work there you need to have a fair amount of money to live and eat there. My Borough, Brooklyn also has widely different religions, nationalities, cultures and histories living alongside each other and both resisting and learning from each other. There are shops in Williamsburg and Greenpoint still owned by Polish families that have been there for over a century. It is this odd combination, that is both neighborhood, (at an intimate and accessible scale) alongside high-rises and a variety of commerce, that speaks so deeply to me.
EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE BELONGS! Everyone certainly doesn’t agree, some barely tolerate others but there is this sense of belonging to this place that is large enough for everyone and contributes to Brooklyn’s current level of creativity in so many domains. This to me is the true meaning of diversity and I for one adore it. It makes me feel safe. Even this now north-of-70 year old woman belongs in these younger, hipper areas like Williamsburg. Each of us paying attention to our own thread and assuming the others are doing the same. Both a bit indifferent but also immediately available in case of emergencies.
Oddly, I have lived in North Oak Cliff, in Dallas Texas just 3 miles from Downtown Dallas for 40 years. I have watched my neighborhood become hip and cool. It is Dallas’s Williamsburg. Yet, even though I know far more people when I am in its trendy Bishop Arts commercial area, I don’t really feel the same sense of belonging as an older person with white hair. It is truly okay, I always wished for this to happen so I am not complaining but noting there must be something in Brooklyn that is NOT TRYING to become anything or be like anywhere else. Maybe it is Brooklyn’s age. It is true as people age we become less interested in “TRYING” and more interested in just “BEING.” Maybe my neighborhood is in its adolescent or young adult phase and it too will evolve into the best kind of hospitality? The kind that barely notices you, because everyone is both stranger and neighbor.