one phone call....

yesterday, shortly after finishing yesterday's blog, set me off. It was a cancellation of a session that was scheduled---only $20.00 that I would not receive, but somehow I was upset by it. Apparently the library where the session was supposed to take place was closed when the AC went down. Forced to respond, cityboy decided to go off to Brooklyn in search of new reading material and an inexpensive afternoon and evening. Did he succeed/?
   After two hours at the Brooklyn Library at Grand Army Plaza, cityboy embarked on a journey into southern Crown Heights---a world that has been much on cityboy's mind in the past few weeks. Checking the catalog, I discovered that I book I was looking for---Durocher_--the biography of baseball great Leo Durocher---could be found in a library on New York Avenue and Maple Street. It was hot, but cityboy wanted to do it anyway---jumped on the subway at Brooklyn Museum and took it to the Winthrop Avenue stop, only to find out, that I had overshot my mark. To get to Maple and New York I would have to walk north about six blocks. In the heat! Yet still, I found Nostrand Avenue, and the streets that off shoot it, fascinating---for their variety, their history, the flow of people, mostly from the West Indies, but a few newcomers as well. A few stores look like they are for the new "yuppies" living in the area, but for the most part, the stores seem to serve the west Indian population living there.  My God, Brooklyn is vast!!! I arrived at the library, hot as hell, but elated by the strong air conditioning in the building, and I quickly found my book.
  Then, to kill time, I browsed a little and came upon a book called the Jews of Brooklyn---mostly reminiscences of Brooklyn's past and the Jewish worlds that lived there. It tells of an old Brooklyn, most of the writers are now in their seventies and eighties. But the best was an article by Mark Naison, who describes the tone and world of his Jewish neighborhood (actually a few blocks from the library that I was in) in a detailed yet very focused manner. This neighborhood was very much a mirror of my own in the Bronx. Somehow he articulates the safe energy of the world beautifully.
And on leaving the library I actually walked a few blocks, even if the heat was overwhelming, because I wanted to see the corner that he lived on during the late forties and fifties. There it was: Lefferts Avenue and Kingston Avenue, a world now both Jewish and West Indian---as I walked east on Lefferts, the two blocks from New York Avenue to Kingston Avenue again I passed many old apartment houses, that had probably been built in the 1930.s and 40.s. The families that lived their when I was growing up in the Bronx were the children of those Jews who had settled on the Lower East Side or Brownsville---some brought their elderly parents along with them--and who must have felt they were entering paradise when they moved into those apartments. But they trained their children to be upwardly mobile---it was unspoken, but there. So none returned, by the sixties, coupled with the availability of houses in the suburbs--the poorer people, mostly people of color were moving in. No matter how often I go into that area, or the areas directly south of there---it is about two or three miles into the neighborhood that Bernie Sanders was raised in---I am transfixed by the architecture that I experience. It represents my childhood---I could have been raised in any of those areas if my parents had taught in Brooklyn instead of the Bronx--played stick ball on the streets, etc.
     The walk to the block where Naison was raised hadaa tired me out, afterwards I walked west on Empire to Nostrand---extremely quiet there---and took two buses to the BAM area on Fulton. Had my pizza and ice coffee, then almost in a state of collapse, returned home. It was early but I had nothing left. The night---well, lets just say it was long---filled with thoughts, and a discovery of a  beautiful piece for clarinet and piano by Schumann---listening to it, I was sure it was by Brahms, but I was wrong---It had all those Brahms eclectic stops and starts---but it wasn't by him.
  Today, the plan is to participate in an activist protest at Church Avenue and East 18 street dedicated to the memory of a woman who died while in police custody three years ago. What then? Not sure, will report tomorrow.