[Click on the youtube video for today's soundtrack.]
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| My grandparents’ backyard BBQ with the neighbors Queens Village, early 1960s |
I was raised in a neighborhood much like the ones my parents were raised in, and much like the ones their parents were raised in before that. We grew up in New York City’s neighborhoods — in Hell’s Kitchen and Carroll Gardens, in Greenpoint and Corona, in Flatbush and Queens Village and Glendale. Some neighborhoods were rougher than others, and some were poorer than others, but each had a similar sensibility. They were modern-day clans for immigrant families, places to come up in, places to say you were proud to be from.
On those streets, people knew you, they knew your uncle, they knew your grandmother from another parish, and they might have even been related to you on “the other side,” from Irish counties and Italian villages long since left behind.
We were one or two generations removed from the immigrants who sought security in neighborhoods inhabited by people like themselves. Yet, we still knew their creeds and codes, as if they’d been stitched on our souls. There’s solace in such social DNA.
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| Prom night — and the whole neighborhood came to watch Queens Village, 1965 |
In the early eighties, my parents decided to leave New York City and move to Connecticut. Many of the post-immigrant pockets were scattering — to Connecticut, to Staten Island, to New Jersey, to Long Island, to Pennsylvania — because the city they knew was no longer the city it had become. We were no longer the Irish who need not apply. We’d made it, somehow, and the fenced-in yards, swimming pools, and long-coveted goal of home ownership all beckoned, over bridges and through tunnels.
Although I’ve always been grateful for my parents’ decision to move, I will forever mourn the loss of the neighborhoods we left behind. Ridgefield, Connecticut was a typical New England town — beautiful and pristine, with winding, hilly roads and long-forgotten stone walls. The town didn’t have sidewalks in front of its houses, however, or corner stores, or groups of mothers, sitting on stoops while their children skipped rope in the street. I lamented to my mother when we first moved that there was no decent place for me to play boxball. My mother told me to tell people we were “from Long Island,” even though my obvious accent easily contradicted such a statement.
We had been living in Ridgefield for several months when a new neighbor moved in across the street. My parents walked over to welcome them, and offer a bottle of wine and a handshake. The neighbor thanked us, closed the door and didn’t speak to us again for about two years. That was New England for you.
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| A graduation, a confirmation, a reason to pass out cake Queens Village, early 1960s |
To be honest, that was just fine with my father. He had known nothing but close quarters his whole life, and he wanted to be free of shared bathrooms, frequent family visits and daily phone calls about who said what to whom. He didn’t want to stop and talk on his way home from work. He didn’t want to know anybody, really, and he was ready to shake off the weight that family enmeshment had placed up on him.
Fast-forward thirty years and I am undeniably reaping the benefits of their decision. I graduated from an excellent public high school in Fairfield County — something that would have been unimaginable in my old Queens neighborhood — and went away to college as the first woman in my family to do so. I moved back to the city, married my college sweetheart, and followed him to San Francisco a year later. I started my own business as a freelance writer out west, and charged exorbitant copywriting fees to dot com start-ups who had more venture capital money than they knew what to do with. I embodied my parents’ dreams of getting out, of breaking the mold and having the chance to make different choices.
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| My father, shoveling out the neighbors Queens, 1967 |
But I’ve never forgotten where I’ve come from. Ever.
After our daughter was born, my husband and I moved back east to Ridgewood, New Jersey, where his commute to Manhattan would be manageable. We moved to the east side of town, and as former city dwellers, appreciated the “walkability” that the location offered. I closed up my copywriting shop and became a stay-at-home mother. I buckled my daughter into her jogging stroller and walked to library story time. We made friends at Starbucks. I laid blankets on the village green and watched her toddle after bubbles on spring afternoons. We didn’t take the car.
In the months to come, I realized that our neighborhood was special, not only for its proximity, but because of its people. Many of us were descendants of those New York-era immigrants, perhaps somehow searching for the places we knew as children, or that our grandparents spoke about. Some of us were Ridgewood natives. Others were from different places altogether. But all of us had chosen close quarters over sprawling acreage. We wanted a community for ourselves and our children.
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| My father, his sisters and a neighborhood friend Flatbush, Brooklyn — early 1950s |
My next-door neighbor is a Bronx native. She and I can hang on our shared fence on a summer day and talk for hours, and I’m always glad to do so. My mother met her and her husband when we first moved to Ridgewood. Later, when I told her that the wife grew up in New York City, she smiled and said, “I knew it.”Two doors down are my neighbors, Maureen and Ed. We had only been living in Ridgewood for a few weeks when he stopped me on my way down the street. ”Brooklyn Prep?” he pointed at my sweatshirt, adorned with the name of my father’s high school alma mater. ”I know YOU didn’t go there!” It was comic code, of course, him knowing that I would never have attended the long-gone all-boys’ prep school, and me getting the joke. He told me of how many other Prep men were living in Ridgewood, and softened while telling me. When he passed away a few years ago, my husband and I went to the wake. For a moment, I was a little girl again, amidst the sound of familiar accents and turn of phrases in the funeral home. We are here, dotted along the streets. We remember. It’s in us.
I’d like to think that my neighbors’ ancestors happily plotted the convergence of our neighborhood with some of my relatives up there in the Great Beyond. Sometimes, over wine, we talk of mothers who grew up in Jackson Heights, of fathers who went to Jesuit high schools long since defunct, and of memories and rituals so similar that it’s a wonder we didn’t grow up in the same house. We still have that stitching somewhere within us. It’s frayed and faded, but it’s still a part of who we know ourselves to be.What makes me most happy these days are the legions of kids who play outside on our neighborhood streets. For the most part, we are not parents who fear abductions or other horrible scenarios. Maybe we’ve gotten past that frightening stage of early parenthood, or we collectively believe in the inherent goodness of people. I can’t say exactly when the switch flipped. But I’m glad that it has.
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| A summertime birthday party Ridgewood, Queens — mid-1970s |
We’re not irresponsible, by any means, but we open our doors and let them bike and skateboard and skip to each other’s houses. We give them a chance at a childhood that so many others no longer have.
As a result, our children are mastering the long-lost art of independence. They are learning how to care for people other than those inside their homes, and to realize that there are lives outside of it who warrant respect and fair treatment and trust. They’re not always getting it right, but they’re getting the chance to try it out again and again, day after day, on warm spring weeks and lazy summer afternoons. My daughter recently said to me, “Our street is like my family.” A dear friend who lives around the corner has told me that her sons think of my children as their younger cousins. I know exactly what they mean.
Lest ye think that animated bluebirds whistle in tune on our always-sunny streets over here in the Graydon Pond neighborhood — trust me. I’m not naive. I realize that there have been tears and skirmishes in our backyards, screams of “I hate you!”s and occasional punches thrown. But they’re the same tussles and arguments that siblings would have. I’m sure there are days when my neighbors can’t stand to see my ugly mug or my dirty car lumbering down the street. But they wave anyway.
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| My mother, her brother and their neighbor Bobby posing for 8th grade graduation pictures Queens, 1963 |
Sometimes, as I watch the neighborhood kids play manhunt outside, I think, these are the friendships that my children will remember with fondness. These are the bonds that preceded adolescence, when life was simpler. These are the people that my son and daughter will run into on a subway platform or an amusement park ride with their families, years from now. Their eyes will widen in disbelief as the awareness of childhood friends’ faces comes clearly into focus. How is your father, they’ll ask? Where is your brother these days? When did you get married? Is this your little one? He looks just like you!
They’ll come back here, just for a moment, to Pearsall Avenue, to the “clubhouse” in my side yard, to the skateboard jumps in the street, to remember wiggling through our dog door for juice boxes and popsicles, to laugh about the “sledding hill” that was just a bump in someone’s lawn in that god-awful winter of 2011 — to who they were, back when they were young.
I hope they always carry Pearsall Avenue with them. I hope they know that they’re all my children, just as mine feel that they belong to everyone else around here. (If you’re reading this and they’ve gone into your house unannounced looking for a snack, my apologies in advance.) I hope they have faith in the kindness of others, and trust that help is available when it’s needed. I hope they offer that same kindness and consideration to people as they go out into the world.
It’s what clans do — we look after our own.
