July 28, 2024
The airport is jammed with hundreds of travelers waiting for a delayed flight to Rome. Phones blare out TikToks, tinny FaceTimes, news and music. I am here too early waiting for a flight to Copenhagen. My pride at feeling separate from everyone wherever I go has its counterweight in the regular surprise of finding myself a local.
Yesterday: at the block party on the block where I have lived since 2001. The kids from two doors down are now lanky and tall. Earlier, I had walked to the Botanic Garden, where my feet walk in all seasons over a palimpsest of memories. The stroller in winter, the pawpaw tree, how the wisteria has grown. The memorial double corridor of oak trees I remember they planted after September 11 now tower overhead, shading the benches where there had been no shade before. I sit and gaze up at the canopy of oak; leaf-time passing.
The number of people in the neighborhood has grown. Every weekend these days the farmers’ market floods out onto side streets filled with vendors selling earrings, fruit cups, tamales, stained glass, shea butter, weed, clothes and jewelry. A woman takes the spot between the main library entrance and the children’s entrance. She spreads a blanket on the grass and offers Tarot readings. This weekend she is wearing green lipstick and I smile at her as I do every Saturday.
On my way for a walk to get out of the sweltering apartment I run into S and her husband D who I last ran into here at a protest against Senator Chuck Schumer’s unwillingness to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Schumer’s apartment is nearby; there is always a police officer in front and the barricades that are used to block off the road in front of his place stand crooked and idle on sidewalks when he is in Washington.
S was the doula who supported me in my first pregnancy. She stood between my legs and helped me push out my firstborn, reassuring me and T and the impatient doctor that everything was moving along. She also took the pictures. Now, on the median of Eastern Parkway, I give her a hug. We are 17 years older. When we hired her she made a point to tell us she did not befriend her clients yet shortly after our the birth and for years after, we would go on weekly walks around the park.
I have walked that park circle more times than I can count. Today I wandered through with K, who lives down the block. I’ve known for more than 20 years. We went to the same college and the RA in her first-year dorm was my dear childhood friend H.
I go to the grocery store to get a few things before my trip, passing by the hair salon A started 10 years ago. As a trainee at a fancy salon in Manhattan, A cut my hair for years, practicing on my unruly mop. She was ambitious and fierce, learned color and cuts, and after she left that salon I used to take the train to her house in Sunset Park for haircuts. I see her in the window and we wave.
At the grocery store, a food coop I joined in 2003, I hug Y who is in charge of the cheese department where I usually do my shifts. Then I go in and fill my basket. I is at the register, working his shift. He and I were housemates in college and he moved to New York right after college to work in a field we all thought was a fad, producing DVDs of classic and independent films.
There are a million new restaurants that open and close and new ones open. I mostly go from the thing I know, to get it done, and to the park and the library and the botanic garden. On the way back from the store I pass the bakery that expanded last year into the location that was once the bar that I had gone across from the music school that has a sweet small garden in the back.
On the way home I see an acquaintance, D, walking his dog. Sometimes I see a friend of a friend who lives around the corner. I skim the neighborhood’s surface yet these loose connections are comforting and surprising. I am always departing, forgetting the arrival here so long ago.
The corner bodega is now transformed from when I made my film Associated in the early 2000s. Then, Charlie and Sammy, Palestinian brothers who came to Brooklyn in the 70s, greeted us alternately with boisterous warmth (Charlie) or a tired sweet smile (Sammy). It was after the U.S. invasion of Iraq when I went in the store and saw their employee stacking up the NY Post laden with crazy headlines about Osama and uranium and weapons of mass destruction that I realized I had to focus my attention on what it meant to be from America. A place for my family that fled from somewhere else in a story I was raised to ignore. A place for me and Sammy and Charlie to meet over a counter jammed with candy and batteries and lottery tickets.
For decades, Sammy and Charlie alternated 14 hour workdays at the bodega. My short film traced the course of the day. It showed in a few festivals. They sent their kids to college and to medical school. When the neighborhood got fancy, Charlie and Sammy renamed and renovated the store and put up a fancy sign. They raised their prices and made a lot more money. Then they retired and less than a year later Charlie died suddenly of a heart attack. I saw Sammy from time to time after that but have not seen him in many years. The new guy who bought it was sweet but he is mostly away. I don’t know who is running the bodega now.
Hordes of highschoolers are standing around waiting to get on their delayed plane to Rome. I’m going somewhere I’ve never been to meet friends I only met a year ago. I’m happy going from one place to the next, invisible but anchored.
August 7, 2024
Last week I landed in Copenhagen and spent four days in Malmö Sweden, visiting my new friend I and meeting her husband U and their dogs. I bought plums and watermelon from the fruit and vegetable seller every day. We waved in the morning and in the evening when I went back to where I was staying.
At the Italian food shop I ordered a good espresso every day. I went also to practice Italian. On my third coffee visit I struck up a conversation with L, the woman who made my espressos. She grew up outside Rome, met her Swedish husband in Italy. Now they have three kids. We chat about kids and languages and coming and going. I acknowledge my arrivals & departures are different from moving permanently to a new land. I imagine being local and going there every day and then I leave in a car with my friends A and J who are driving to Oslo from Thessaloniki and whose route takes them through Malmö.
Now I am in Oslo, a place that provides two feelings, one of being absolutely at home, friends, spaces, activities, purpose, commingled with the deep, personal, and hovering delight of knowing I am very much not.
Moving around is reassuring; time’s elastic.
Thanks for reading.
If you are looking for a film that brings the local to new (subterranean) levels, you can watch BUNKER on Amazon, Mubi, Metrograph, and Projectr.tv. from wherever you are.
i love your writing. so much of it chimes.