A Great Read

I stumbled onto a short novel called A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis. Aside from bring darkly comic (an unbeatable combination for me), it had special meaning because it takes places several blocks from our old house in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Mr. Davis bought a rooming house on Greene and Washington in 1971 and began the impossible task of renovating it on his own. This was on the Bed-Stuy border, a no-man's land of crumbling real estate and lost souls trying to live as best they could. Davis still lives in Brooklyn in the same house I believe. What he paid $7,000 for is no doubt worth $1.5 million now. The neighborhood is very different these days, expensive to live in and with a certain cachet that Davis might not comprehend (or want to). I know I can't, and I moved there in 1985. Even with crack dealers living across the street in a house the plumbing had been stripped from, it was already a fairly mild environment. Sure there were bums staggering around, but there was also Mr. Ferguson, a southern gent who grew roses and clipped them for the neighborhood ladies. Before we left in 1996, Range Rovers began parking on the block. What had been extreme diversity is now a very narrow slice of life. Age, income, race, occupation--whatever defines an area, has been packaged and can be purchased at the now chi-chi corner store.

Well, I'm glad we lived there when we did, and that the kids grew up there for a while and saw that everyone wasn't all like them, and didn't even necessarily like them. Mariel went to P.S. 20 for three years and got a good education there, one that prepared her for real life, not the fauxburban one that we live in now.

Moving back to NYC poses challenges, especially after living in tropical paradise for six years and the woods for eight. NYC is crowded and filthy and nature is an after-thought. The tourists gawking at the World Trade Center site raise shadenfreude to a new art. The streets are slicked with human and dog effluvia, so much so that we remove our shoes when we walk into the apartment. There's little greenery, but, there's life, lots of it. And diversity, entertainment, culture, jobs; even the welcome oases of parks and small gardens.

We may move back to Brownstone Brooklyn eventually. Most of our friends live there. We can't afford to buy anything now but we could rent. We're no longer hipsters (our hips are crumbling), but we remember the days when Fulton Street had few services, when alarms blared night and day and when saying you were from Fort Greene raised eyebrows. I could look up L.J. Davis and we could chat about the really olden days. We could grab a Starbucks and marvel at the changes we've seen.