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Monday, September 1, 2014

Sun Scorched Pavement and the Beauty of a Brooklyn Summer



  • Back near the end of June I posted about Summer in the city. Here it is September first and I feel like I need to write at least once more about something that's been such a special season of my life. Even if I say the exact same thing in different words, it's itching to come out. 

The above photograph is one of my absolute favorites from New York, one of my favorites ever, really. I have a good feeling it will be sitting, framed, somewhere in our home long after the little boy and girl in it cease to live there. 

It's sort of the quintessential urban children picture to me. Little children enjoying a steamy day, playing in a gushing fire hydrant on the sun-scorched pavement of our city streets. And at a block party no less. Feels like something from yesteryear. I'll treasure it always. 

And I'll treasure this Summer itself always. It's been different from any other time in my life. So many happy memories have been made in the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

Planned outings to parades and street fairs and festivals and often even better just stumbling upon of someone's block party, or drumline performance, or mural painting celebration complete with Spanish music and food. 

That day, back in May, when we found ourselves passing a college graduation. I vividly remember a small framed, older Middle Eastern woman- covered head to toe as is her culture's tradition- and wearing the brightest smile of anyone I've ever seen holding a diploma. 

The notably too infrequent trips to the public pool where the ladies sort of smiled because we didn't bring locks and wore tennis shoes and asked questions about how to work the mandatory pre-entry showers. The free lunches they were so awfully insistent on providing our pretty obviously middle class kids. 

The Sunday morning bus rides with all the older ladies in hats and heels. 

All the nights when I'd click on the national news right before going to bed and watch apprehensively, hoping nothing truly terrible would happen, from a place far away (and a position for away) as night would fall on a midwestern town and people would try to sort through their sadness and anger and fears. Ferguson belongs on this list because I doubt I will ever reflect deeply on this Summer without it coming to mind. It's bittersweet and the only only sweetness is in the hope I have that tomorrow can be better for our brothers and sisters of color. 

The afternoon we discovered the different playgrounds at the Brooklyn piers and the kids got so dirty there was absolutely no way to get all the stains out of their clothes and for the very first time I literally gave not one teeny tiny damn. 

The stupidly amazing, given that it was eighties hair band music, Broadway show with Claire and the freezing cold Five Guys we ate at afterwards. 

Every minute we spent with my mom showing her the streets and nooks and corners of the city we love.

  • The almost weekly visits to Coney Island for fair rides and fireworks and cotton candy and other silliness. The putting to bed of our small, sandy, salty, Coney Island-encrusted children on a pallet on the floor because it's 1:30 AM and we just were not going to bathe them.

The three people who live in this little eight hundred square foot space with me, a handful of others that we've befriended through various venues, and truthfully the eight point three million people that make this place what it is. 

All of that has combined to make this past Summer in Brooklyn beautiful and a time in my life I'll never forget.  

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