search the past. At 3:00 in the morning---body wants action---to move around, but do not want to go out, take a walk, and please it. I have been out this time before---a few times during the first days of the pandemic--when I was angry at what happened---but at this moment prefer to stay in. Not a good time to read, eyes are tired---somehow they can tolerate the computer better. Went to googlemaps, and visited Vyse Avenue around 174th, 173rd street in the Bronx. Must we go into this again---a neighborhood now basically a working class, poor neighborhood, filled with apartment houses, that once, when I was growing up, housed a mostly Jewish population. My father taught at James Monroe High School, and that would have been mostly children from that neighborhood would have gone. In late 61, early 62, I had a couple of dates with one of his students, or something. She was nice, but nothing happened. But as I traveled the neighborhood, I remember feeling relaxed and safe. Two or three years later, it began to "turn", the influx of black and Puerto Rican familes began, while many of tha Jewish families moved to the new apartment houses that replaced the lot and lawn that abutted my apartment house. I began this post when I found myself thinking about visiting Park Heights Avenue in Baltimore, now a very dangerous place, but during my four years at Hopkins, the epicenter of a thriving Jewish neighborhood. It too, was changed, around the late sixties. Yet in my memory it is safe, and meaningful as a place that I could be. Such a sense of sadness, when I googlemap those neighborhoods, but why? A "longing for the past?" Yet here I am.
The visit to Vyse Avenue was prompted by the book I am reading: Random Family, by Adrian LeBlanc. The author follows two women, born into poverty in the Bronx, living in chaotic family situations, moving all over the poor sections of the borough. It it a book that I always return to---I think this is my third complete reading of it---it really draws the reader in---reading it got me through the weekend. In my earlier readings I was just following the action--this is the first time I reallly remember being repulsed and sickened by the world the people in the novel exist in. People coming in and out of the apartments at all hours, drug use in front of small children, lovers exchanging partners indiscriminately---what would it have been like to have been a child in those circumstances, I wonder with horror?
Visited the newly refurbished Mid Manhattan library this morning, on 40th and fifth. What an amazing place! Lots of room to wander on the floors, a great selection of books; chairs on each floor to sit and read whatever you want, and a snack bar on the top floor. I could stay there all day, reading if I wanted to. Must return soon, and also visit the newly refurbished library at Grand Army Plaza---I hear that has some great new aspects to it (hopefully that includes the rest rooms, which, pre pandemic, were pretty grungy). Pre pandemic it was nothing for me to go there and browse, second nature almost. Now, with the illness and its accoutrements, going there will be a very different experience, a test of sort. Still, must do it soon.
Seem to have made my statement for today. Should post a little more then just weekly---will try sooner...
No comments:
Post a Comment