View Today

It's been a little over three weeks since we welcomed Little O (as he shall be named) to the world and things have been going well.  There have been many sleepless nights but it's an adventure each day. We learn about one another. I figure out how to add mother to the roles I've assumed throughout my life.

I love to hold him in my arms. I love to watch him sleep. I like to dress him -- a real life doll, squirming, squeaking, as I fit a tiny arm through a sleeve.  Right now, I am simply amazed at the way he moves from sleep to waking and reverse. Then I wonder what he might see when he is awake, wide-eyed and staring out into our world. His eyes are big and, right now, blue, and I like to watch them look. I try not to think too much of what's to come but it's hard not to wonder who he will be.

This month, I'm going to attempt the February Photo A Day Challenge which I discovered, during a late-night, bleary-eyed feeding. I thought it might be a low-stress way to be on the blog a bit and work creatively in small patches of time.

I missed the first day but I have a few photos that I believe fit that theme of a view today.  I love the foot bridge at the end of our street.  It takes us over the highway to the subway, to our neighborhood of shops and restaurants and tree-lined streets and stoops.

To me, this is what it looks like to live where I live, on the waterfront. If I were to close my eyes and imagine our neighborhood, these are the first structures I think about, the movement of shipping containers all along our ribbon of street. 

Exploring Red Hook, Brooklyn

This is Red Hook, Brooklyn, a neighborhood I'd call mine if real estate divides hadn't designated us as the Columbia Waterfront. It's a short walk towards the bend and bust of rusted fences cornered with overgrown grass. I look through metal bars at the cruise terminal and encounter the careful swirl of paint against aluminum and brick.

Red Hook is as deliberate as it is haphazard. Beyond the projects, the ball fields, the towel skirts and inner tubes spilling from the community pool, there are farm to table restaurants next to stores that sell high-end baby clothes. Printed onesies of a Kentile Floors sign silhouette. The old abandoned trollies sit at the foot of a warehouse turned artist's collective and gallery. The chocolate factory pumps a whispered Wonka reminiscence, a place that also managed to carve out a barrelled whiskey distillery in a courtyard of trees.  

There are buckets of key limes in a smoky shack where they make, only, key lime pies. I'll see them carefully packaged and sold with labels at the local grocery store and it seems too Easter pastel and pristine for the goods of a place cranking out graham cracker crust and slippery green next to the glass-blowing artists at the pier.

At night, there's the slight twang of blue grass from Sunny's bar, a simple hum that spawned rabid kickstarter campaigns when the bar had to close its doors after Sandy blew through.

The streets of Red Hook are quiet, often deserted, but just beyond the brick and cobblestone, creativity pulses, the way the dock-workers there once drummed the New York harbor to life. I love this place and sometimes claim it when asked where I live. Near Red Hook, I'll say. On the border of an accidental neighborhood. 

At the Edge

The first time I lived in New York City, over one summer during graduate school, I lived at the heart of it, in the 30's on Third Avenue.  I wanted to be in the center of things.  I craved crowds and anonymity. 

When I moved back years later, I was pushed out towards the river and lived on First Avenue.  This was completely dictated by real estate prices.  The farther you are from the subway in New York City, the less expensive the rent.  I stayed on the far East side of Manhattan for several years and, slowly, I began to set up a life on these quiet edges of Manhattan. I preferred less crowds, the East River running path, the quiet streets.

Now, I live on the other side of the river. In Brooklyn.  I live on the 'wrong' side of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in a neighborhood no one has ever heard of (the Columbia Waterfront District) so I have to claim a different neighborhood in conversation (Carroll Gardens).  I live far from the subway next to shipping containers and terminals and abandoned lots teeming with stray cats.


Today, Tyler and I rode our bicycles along the edge of our Brooklyn, to Greenpoint.  He watched the tugboats.  I became fascinated with these statues.  While there is so much to see in the center of New York, I always point visitors towards its edge. A river path, a pier, a park.  The ghosts of people sit here, looking as water laps against the rocks. It's strange, and empty and beautiful. And there is, in my opinion, just as much inspiration, if not more, at the edge of things.

What lies at the edge of your world?

Where Do You Go?

On this Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway asks: When you need creative inspiration, where do you go?

I like the question because place is the largest driving force behind most of my writing. I have never taken a journey to find creative inspiration. I simply walk and live and, in doing that, I am inspired.

When I stepped back to think where that inspiration most often happens, I discovered that it is both near my home and near water.  I think I am still trying to understand why water sets my imagination free.  Maybe because it is vast and uncontrollable, difficult to keep, always moving, bending, emptying, swelling.  Maybe there is something within it I can not capture and so I try.

Below are some photos of the waters that inspire me. I am lucky to live just steps away from them.

So, where do you go?

New York Harbor (I live on the the Brooklyn waterfront)

Atlantic Ocean (from Coney Island)

The Gowanus Canal

Claiming Space

I see him each day right in the middle of the bike path on Columbia Street, next to a fence covered in tarp, near the shipyards lining the waterfront.   He sits in a dilapidated lawn chair, poking at the air with an umbrella as a cane.  He is blanketed in all black, head and shoulders draped with candy colored serapes, shrouded in a cloud of bobbing pigeons.  Stray cats leak from his feet, circle him like the horses of a slow carousel.

He is a fixture, the subject of local articles, a prophet of sorts, sharing the thoughts of the alley cats he claims to know.  At night, I am told, or so the articles say, he leaves for Manhattan, rides his bike or walks over the legend of a bridge.

When I pass, when I pedal or run the path, he is not kind.  The whites of his eyes grow large and he often stands, makes a show of it, sticks the flaking, dry skin of his middle finger right in my face.  I make a point to thank him.  Out loud.  I say the words because I know no other way to acknowledge his anger than to be unapologetically grateful that I am the recipient.

He thinks the space, the slice of concrete, is his to keep.  He thinks I do not belong there with him even if I am just passing through.  What have you really claimed? I want to ask.  What's here but you?

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?

Some of you had inquired about my neighborhood deli, which I told you was the victim of the fire. I am pleased to announce that the deli has re-opened with renovations that include: a brand new awning, a spanking new name “The Express Grocery”, the addition of floor to ceiling windows, and bright lights that shine from the awning in an otherwise dark, and dingy corner above the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. I saw the two owners smiling as they re-stocked their shelves and I thought all was right with the world.

Of course, not every story has a happy ending. I have not yet discussed what happened at the Laundromat because it is too confusing and painful. But I’m ready to tell the story now.

I do a Wash and Fold. For those of you who may not know, this means that I drop off my laundry and someone washes it, dries it, folds it and I pick it up when it’s done. Hence the name: Wash. And. Fold. It is a ridiculous expense (About $40 - $50 a month) but I don’t care. I am proud to say that I have not done my laundry since early 2004. To be fair, I have never had a washer/dryer in my apartment OR even in my apartment building since moving to New York City. In all honesty, I have forgotten what these strange contraptions look like. I enjoy living in ignorant bliss.

But things are not all rosy, happy, snappy at the Wash and Fold on Union Street. Maria is gone. My Maria. The woman who had me singing West Side Story as I skipped to and from the Laundromat. Who greeted me each morning with an amazing smile and said, “I hope you have a beautiful day Meleesa!” Who wondered where I was when I came back with a heap full of clothes after a vacation. Who told me I worked too hard and I deserved a rest when I arrived after 8pm to pick up my laundry (but who never once complained that she had been there since early morning). Who insisted that Tyler carry the laundry because that is the ‘right’ thing to do, the ‘chivalrous’ thing. Who told me, rather cheekily, that she makes her husband do all the laundry even when she could do it where she works.

She’s just…gone.

It’s now been 4 months without Maria and I’ve finally given in to that fact that she is not coming back. I don’t know who these crazy people are at the Laundromat now. There’s someone new every single day. They have some weirdo automated machine that prints out laundry tickets and they spell my name: Mallissa. And Tyler’s name: Taillor. Despite the fact that they have the machine, the drop off now takes forever and a day. They won’t do Taillor’s shirts because they have holes in the elbows (don’t ask, the guy has knives for elbows) even when he gives them permission to do so. They sigh when I tell them what time I will be coming to pick up the laundry. They can never remember what color my laundry bag is. AND, I didn’t want to bring this up, but I feel I must. There was once a pair of foreign black underwear in my laundry bag after a pickup. Let’s just say they were not mine and leave it at that.

I’m really devastated about Maria. Not because of my laundry, but because I just thought she was a warm, generous person I enjoyed chatting with in the mornings. I’ve considered frantically calling out her name on Columbia street in Red Hook (she once told us she lives on this street). But that is a predominantly Latin neighborhood and I’m sure there are probably 500 Maria’s in the many high rises that stretch along that one street. Other than that, I haven’t come up with any other creative ideas to find her. I’ll miss her very much. As the little Von Trapp children said in The Sound of Music when Maria went back to the convent, She didn’t even say goodbye…

If you are reading this post and you happen to know where Maria is, please let me know. I need some closure. And if any of you meet anyone named Maria, anytime, anywhere, please ask her if she once worked at a Laundromat on Union Street in Brooklyn and, if she did, send her my love.