Not Lost, Only Moved

In previous posts on my other blog, I've said that I've never regretted going on a bike ride.  I've also said that I never felt worse after a ride than I did when I started it.  Oh, I've felt tired, in pain and had other physical maladies. But they all healed, probably because riding my bike relieves me, at least for a time, of mental and emotional stresses.

Although I've never wished I hadn't gone on a ride or felt less happy than I was before I took the ride, that's not to say that I don't experience things that make me sad.  I've gone to favorite cafes, bookstores and even bike shops, only to find they'd closed. I've also ridden to some place or another only to find that a lovely, or simply tranquil, piece of land has been turned into a shopping mall or tract housing, or that some other place has been changed beyond recognition.

Of course, some changes--like the closure of a deli or restaurant--are inevitable.  Actually, in the grand scheme of things, change is the only thing you can count on.  As Lao Tsu wrote, "Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.  Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow."

Well, while riding late this afternoon, I saw a change that I simply can't resist.  It's something that's been done, and there's no turning back.  So, according to Lao, I won't create sorrow.  But I'm feeling some now.

That change involves something that was as important to my childhood as the places in which we lived.  I was pedaling up and down residential streets in Queens and Brooklyn, in and out of neighborhoods where hipsters and Hasidim and Hispanics--and people with all sorts of other identities--live.  I skirted the edges of the neighborhoods--Borough Park and Bensonhurst--in which I grew up.  I found myself on Ditmas Avenue, at East Fourth Street, where I saw this:

If you've been in that part of Brooklyn, you might think it looks like any number of catering or event halls.  As a matter of fact, that's what that building was--before I entered it.  Long before I entered it, in fact.  

By the time my family moved to Dahill Road, about half a dozen blocks away, that building had become a place where I would spend almost as much time as I spent in the house or in school.  In fact, during the summer, I would spend hours there that, during the rest of the year, I would have passed in school.

It was the Kensington Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.  Everyone knew how much I loved to read, but in my family (immediate and extended) there weren't many books nor much money for them.  (Also, I think that the strains of blue-collar jobs and child-rearing didn't leave my parents, or other adults in our circle, with much energy for reading, to themselves or with kids.)  But that library, it seemed, had an endless supply.  And the librarians were happy to see a kid whose reading didn't consist only of school assignments.

Plus, going to the library was one thing neither my mother nor anyone else questioned.  If I wanted to go anywhere else, I had to say what I planned to do there, who would be there and who would go with me.  When I went to the library, she said only, "Just be home for supper."

Usually, I would take a few books--story or poetry collections, histories or books about exotic and faraway places--and browse them at one of the tables.  Most days, I succeeded in getting a seat at the table by the center window:

Now, from that window, one could see only up and down Ditmas Avenue, East Fourth Street and a few nearby streets--and over the rows of houses.  But I could see far enough that all of those things eventually faded into a scrim of cirrus clouds, a wall of rain or a vista of twilight.  The world opened out in front of that window, just as world opened with the books I took from the shelves of the Kensington Branch.

Seeing it closed, I feared the worst, since the library budget seems not to have increased since the days when I was using that branch.  But, in riding along, I found out that the Kensington Branch had merely moved to another location, about the same distance--though in another direction--from the house in which I lived.  In other words, I could have walked there just as easily.  And my mother probably would have told me just to remember to be home in time for supper.

From The Neighborhood

Yesterday, for the first time in a couple of weeks, I felt decent and had a few free hours at the same time.  So I went, naturally, for a ride.

The sky was as blue as the air was crisp:  Fall had arrived, if not officially, and yet another summer, another season had passed.  On such a day, I can understand how someone can be agoraphobic:  An open space--whether of land or sea or sky--can seem like a huge, yawning emptiness when there are no markers, physical or emotional.

So all anyone can do--or, at least, all I could do-- was to move through it.  That I did by pedaling, by pedaling Tosca, my fixed-gear bike.  I had a feeling I wouldn't ride a lot of miles, and that I'd ride them slowly, so I wanted to get some kind of workout from them.

As it turned out, I rode about 50 or 60 km, or a bit more than 30 or 35 miles, along the steel and glass shorelines and brick byways that have lined so much of the path of my life. 

A meander from the East River and the bay took me into the heart of Brooklyn, specifically to this place:

On the sidewalks in front, and across the street, from this building careworn and harried, yet content, men and women prodded groups of pale but energetic children as their feet stuttered about the grid of concrete blocks.  Although those children looked different from the way my brothers, my peers and I looked, something was very, very familiar about the rhythm of their steps and their calls to each other.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised.  Although I had not been there in quite some time, I know that building, and that block, as well as any in this world.  In fact, I know it so well that I can tell you that nearly half a century ago, it didn't have the canopy you see in the photo.

Nor did it have the gate that now encloses the courtyard:

By now, you may have guessed that I lived in that building very early in my life.  Some of my oldest memories, for better and worse, are of those days.  

I think it's a co-operative now rather than the building of rental apartments it was in my childhood.  Also, as you probably have guessed, it's populated by families of Hasidic Jews.  In my day, nearly all of the families--of whom my family knew most--consisted of Italian- or Jewish (non-Hasidic)-Americans.  The men worked blue-collar jobs or had stores or other small businesses and the women stayed home and raised us.  In that sense, I guess we weren't so different from the people who live there now.

Then, as now, it was very unlikely that a woman--much less one like me--would have been riding a bicycle down that street--or, for that matter, any of the other streets I pedaled yesterday.  I turned, not quite at random, down a series of avenues and roads and other byways until I reached the southwestern part of Bensonhurst, not far from Coney Island.

I wasn't feeling hungry, but I stopped at a pizzeria--Il Grotto Azzuro--on 21st Avenue, near 85th Street.  From the street, it looks like one of many others of its kind.  But I went in anyway.

"Can I help you?"  The man's accent seemed even more familiar than anything else I'd experienced throughout my ride.

After ordering a classic Neapolitan slice and a white slice, he chimed, "You're gonna have the best pizza there is.   How did you know you were gonna find it here?"

"I followed my nose," I intoned, playing along.  "I always follow my nose when I'm riding my bike."

Somehow I sensed his claim wasn't hype.  Even if it wasn't the best pizza, the guy really believed that it was.  After finishing both slices, I ordered another Neapolitan, even though I was quite full.  "You're right!," I exclaimed.

Those Neapolitan slices were certainly the best I've had in a while.  Even though they were slices and it was five in the afternoon--near the end of the lull between lunch and dinner--it and the white slice tasted fresher than many I've had from just-cut whole pies.  

Sometimes, in the course of a bike ride, a slice of pizza or a bottle of beer can seem like the best you've ever had because you're tired or hungry. (I think now of the sugar and lemon crepe I gulped down after pedaling up Le Col du Galibier.  I've had dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other crepes in France.  But that one was the best.) However, I felt surprisingly good in spite of my recent illness and, as I mentioned, I wasn't hungry when I found Il Grotto Azzuro.

It's been there a while.  As I ate, another customer--a lifelong resident of the neighborhood--told me he'd been going there for more than 30 years.  I hope it's there for at least that much longer: The neighborhood is changing. 

So fueled, I continued down to Coney Island where, after thumping and clattering along the boardwalk (All of it is now open), a guard waved me into Sea Gate, which counts Isaac Bashevis Singer and Beverly Sills among its onetime residents.   I'd heard the area, not surprisingly, took an even greater hit than the surrounding neighborhood from Superstorm Sandy.  But, while the beaches were as eroded as those in Coney Island (though less so than those of the Rockaways or parts of New Jersey), most of the houses seemed to weather the wind and tides well.  Most seemed little different from what they were at this time last year; a few were still being repaired. 

At one of those houses, someone who didn't know my name called me:

  
Of course I stopped.

He capped his head with the palm of my hand and tiptoed along the rails, rubbing the side of his body through my fingers.  I think he knew I'm "from the neighborhood."