MotherSister Brooklyn

Growing up between the coasts in the late ’70s to the early ’90s, TV and movies provided me with a steady diet of glimpses into freak show New York: Saturday Night Live, Fame, MTV (1981-86), Taxi, Taxi Driver, just to name a few examples. But one of my earliest and most enduring impressions of New York was formed by a more G-rated source: Sesame Street. A multicultural paradise of stoops where kids could play, sit, be. By and large, I feel like I inhabit that neighborhood now. Except — where are the kids? (And I’m not talking about the ones in strollers.)

In today’s Times, “Anyone Up for Stickball? In a PlayStation World, Maybe Not” examines the apparent death of the city’s kiddie street life. (Assuming you didn’t live it, if you’ve ever read Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude or watched, say, Spike Lee’s Crooklyn, you probably have a good idea of what it was like.) The article mentions many reasons for the decline, with traffic striking me as one of the top three; and as The Hub pointed out when we discussed it, there are now really great playgrounds in most neighborhoods, obviating the need to play in the street. (Crime might seem like a major factor, too, but it’s not like New York City streets were safer in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s than they are today, so I’m not so sure about that.) I have walked around the nabe and wondered what to do when The Scamp is old enough to go out and ride a bike or join a pick-up game without me hovering nearby; it seems like no one really lets their kids do that here anymore, which is kind of a shame. (I guess that’s when we’ll be signing him up with the local tennis, soccer, or cricket leagues.) With the current local baby boom, though, I could see how on some of the more cohesive, tighter-knit blocks (like sections of St. James Place, Waverly, or South Oxford Street) there could be a skelly renaissance, thanks to a clever spirit like Delores Hadden Smith (see p. 2 of the Times article).

But this isn’t limited to just New York: When I visit my folks in the Old Country, the neighborhood that I used to roam on my purple bike — going to the creek to catch tadpoles, chasing down the ice cream man, learning dance routines on the lawn — appears oddly child-free as well. I don’t get it. Maybe I need to check in with my pre-teen niece and nephew for some insight — or read Bowling Alone.

[Photo from Streetplay.com]

The Scamp and I have established a summer Saturday morning constitutional that usually includes a walk through Fort Greene Park and the farmer’s market for bread and eggs. Along the way today, we stumbled across this cute little cafe, Bidonville, on Willoughby between Carlton and Adelphi.

When we stopped in, I immediately recognized the (gorgeous, French-speaking) woman who greeted us from around the neighborhood; she and her husband own the cafe, which just opened on Wednesday and still seems to be coming together. So far, they have a small selection of croissants, muffins, and pastries, tea, and coffee; Sefu, the manager, said they plan to offer sandwiches and focus on the coffees. A good thing, too, because for all the cafes in the neighborhood, not many serve coffee worth the trip. (I used to work in an espresso bar — when that was a new concept, however pretentious — and my best girlfriends are Italian and half-French, so I’m admittedly picky about what constitutes good coffee and espresso.) The Pillow Cafe and now the very “French Greene” Bidonville — nice to have options.

[ETA: Apparently I missed Dana Rubenstein’s Brooklyn Paper column from a couple of weeks ago — yet another new cafe on the horizon, on DeKalb Avenue. What on earth is going on with Fulton Street that for all the new business development in the nabe, precious little of it is happening on the southern edge (except for ugly, overpriced condos)? Is it the Atlantic Yards? Or, um, the methadone clinic?]

I’ve had two deadlines in my cross-hairs, hence the less personal postings. A few random bits:

* I’m a sucker for a rambling rose. Stevie Nicks, my aunt Jerdine (3 husbands, 5 boys, and countless jobs later), Sula (the Toni Morrison character), any woman who has lived it and lived it well. I’ll sit and listen to the details of their lives any day of the week. So of course I found this New York Times article on writer and Fort Greene resident Susanna Moore engrossing. I just wish they’d shown more of her apartment!

* Two local musts for the hot, hot summer: The cucumber lime juice at Urban Spring on DeKalb Avenue, and the fatoosh salad at Zaytoons on Myrtle Avenue.

* I have very little time to read, and yet I have subscriptions to the New Yorker, Granta, Wax Poetics, and The Economist. (Yeah, I’m crazy.) But I’ve been putting them aside to read Shirley Chisholm’s Unbought & Unbossed, the true story of a Brooklyn-raised Barbadian woman’s political ascent. Chisholm, who died in 2005, was plainspoken and hard-headed and had the stones to run for president in 1972 (I’ll have to pick up a copy of The Good Fight, too) — and 35 years later, that’s still a stunning thing. (Which says a lot about how far we haven’t come.) If you have a chance, check out Shola Lynch’s documentary about Chisholm or dig up a copy of the books.

The Hub and I have all but given up on buying a place in the city; not only do we not want to leave Clinton Hill, but I’m guessing we’re also priced out of Prospect-Lefferts, Victorian Flatbush, Midwood, and the Rockaways anyway. If only I’d bought that seventh-floor, $110K studio at The Griffin when I had the chance!

Instead, we began to consider buying an inexpensive cabin, where we could let our design and control-freak fantasies run amok and give The Scamp someplace to play nature boy. The search lead us to the discovery of bungalow communities, which are generally co-op or leased land deals. They’re in the woods, like the Buffalo Colony, as well as on beaches in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and (gasp) Long Island. There are even communities that give the term “trailer park” a new spin, though that wasn’t really what we were after. A lot of the ones in upstate New York seem to be Orthodox Jewish, though I did encounter one that (as the cottage’s owner made a point of telling me) is inhabited by people of Italian and Irish descent. (For those of you who know my RL name, perhaps he innocuously thought this was simply a selling point.) Hippie/artistic communities are around, too, though they seem hard to find. And to my surprise (given that both blacks and Jews were compelled to create their own vacation options during segregation), I didn’t find any black vacation communities.

The cohousing aspect of these cottage communities is attractive; it’s also nice to leave the maintenance largely to someone else for a reasonable annual fee. Of course, there’s risk associated with the fact that you don’t own the land on which your cottage sits, as one community on a Connecticut beach has discovered. But considering that the cottages typically cost $20K to $100K (which I would argue is really too much to pay for this kind of arrangement), they also seem to be one of the last few ways for solidly middle-class folks with a little cash to spend to regularly vacation in areas that increasingly seem to be the preserve of the rich. I dig the idea so much that I’d love to gather some like-minded folks and start one of our own.

Tight close-up on a full mouth. A deep masculine voice says, “Can I get you anything else?” Pull back to reveal Boris Kodjoe — no, Isaach De Bankolé, my taste has become more seasoned — dressed in an Ozwald Boateng suit, standing on the deck of my St. Lucian bungalow against a backdrop of the Caribbean Sea. Or no, maybe it’s Takeshi Kaneshiro in Prada, on the deck of my Indonesian bungalow against the backdrop of the Indian Ocean. No matter.

I snuggle into my silk robe, having just emerged from an outdoor garden shower. “No thanks,” I pip breezily. I toss my head toward the Frette-sheeted twin bed. “I have what I need.”

He turns. He goes. I turn. I collapse into a cloud. Fade to black.

A badly scratched Mary Poppins LP clatters against my head. I open one eye against the light. The Scamp is standing over me, a look of indignation on his face. “Mama!” he reprimands. I’m curled up on his floor. Caught at it again.

I used to fantasize about sex. Now, post-Scamp, I fantasize about sleep.

(more…)

Cancer has been on my mind a lot lately. When I was younger and more flip, I could sing along to Joe Jackson’s “[Everything Gives You] Cancer“; now, it just makes me worry more. Having a child certainly makes you intensely aware of your own mortality, but it’s more than that: One of The Hub’s close friends is tending to his dying father; one of my aunts has just begun an 8-month chemotherapy course for breast cancer; and Pop is on the “joy juice” again himself, 16-1/2 years after his initial diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. (”Joy juice” is his preferred term. There are many things that are black about my father, and his sense of humor is definitely one of them.) I even found myself thinking this morning about Mfon Essien, a photographer of The Hub’s acquaintance who was diagnosed with breast cancer at 31 and died at age 35.

Yesterday was National Cancer Survivors Day, and so I salute those still fighting the battle and those in remission, including Grandpa Bob and my godmother Rose. June is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, so get yourselves checked, men. And ladies, tomorrow morning in the shower, please squeeze your girls. (You can even get a free card to hang in your shower as a reminder.)

Thank the stars someone had the good sense to install an automated postal center in the Myrtle Avenue p.o. and to actually keep it in working order most of the time. I was able to finish what I attempted yesterday at the Fulton Street p.o. in less than a minute on Myrtle. Which made it worth the extra 10-minute walk on a sultry day.

The Scamp and I took our usual route through the Willoughby Walk co-ops, and we passed this totally empty (and locked) playground.

It’s always shuttered like this. A shame, too, because it has relatively new equipment unlike that at other local playgrounds. The co-op residents seem to be on the older end of the spectrum, but I have seen at least a couple of kids playing nearby (though never on the playground). If they sold day passes, we’d buy; The Scamp would love to take a crack at the humpy slides.

We also paused for a few moments to take in this view at the corner of Vanderbilt and Willoughby avenues:

The house on the left, dubbed “Darth Vader” by Howard Pitsch in a recent article on neighborhood architecture for The Hill, was built 2 years ago but I’d never stopped to take it in before today. I’m always distracted by watching who’s coming and going from the church on the corner:

Occasionally I think about dropping in on a service, but then I realize that I’d be no more inclined to really pay attention to the sermon just because it’s in French. But the idea of watching someone catch le fantôme saint is somehow mildly enticing to me, if only because my Baptist forebears were so culturally anglo.

Another day, another frustrated trip to the Fulton Avenue post office. Of course, the line was nearly out the door, and there were only two windows open. Upon hearing me and a woman in front of me lament the perpetually understaffed state of the p.o., the woman behind us chimed in that postal employees request transfers (usually to the p.o. in their own neighborhood) and the branches are left waiting for replacements to transfer in. She laid the blame on customers who arrived at the window without their packages ready to go. Since I was about to be one of those customers — well, sort of, as I just needed to slip my page proofs into a Priority Mail envelope and slap the label I’d already filled out on it — and since I was short on time, I hightailed it out of there.

Back on the steamy street, some fetching orchids in the window of a florist’s shop caught my eye. Reasons has been there for 5 years, and I’d never been in. The Hub picks up our house flower, the stargazer lily, there all the time. I decided to stop in, get a cool blast of refrigerated air, and hopefully leave with some orchids. Alas, the orchids were fake. But they sure made a pretty picture on the stagnant strip that Fulton Street has become. I got our stargazers instead.