This morning (August 14, 2009) I opened my front door, my dog leashed and ready to take a long walk in the humid semi-sunny summer morning. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a huge cloud of dust down the street. I had heard the jackhammers…they started about 8:30, and had been going on for an hour since.
(Bear with me, there’s a story here)
When I was a little kid, and my Brooklyn neighborhood was a very different place, summer evenings were spent outdoors in the street. I was friends with a girl a few years younger named Ashley. She lived down the block, in a house with blue siding, and a weather-worn wooden door with three circular glass windows. I remember that I used to explore and play on our block with her and her little brother, Tom. Different games of imagination and wonder. We would play “castle” on my brick stoop, and “mouse game” where we would race our bicycles as fast as we could down the sidewalk…I’m not sure where we got the name from. Our favorite game was exploring. We would examine every square inch of our block, looking for treasures: leaves of interesting shape and color, twigs, those spiky ball things that come off of the trees, and if we were very lucky, interesting pebbles and pennies.
One evening, we found a fragment of ceramic buried in the cement sidewalk. It couldn’t have been bigger than an inch wide. It was beautiful, bright blue and white. Possible from the rim of a teacup or a plate of some sort, it had a ring of little white flowers along its edge. This piece of ceramic was magical and mysterious to us. From the day we found it, we would walk over to it, and stare at it, point to it, and touch it for good luck before beginning our games. We would make up stories about how it came to be there…what it was, and what sort of magic it held.
We tried to dig it out of the cement with sticks and pebbles to see if there was an entire cup buried there. No luck. We then began searching the sidewalks of our block carefully, looking for more pieces of the ceramic cup. We would look through the chain-link fence into the empty lot. It was full of gravel, and bright shiny pebbles…we were sure we would find a piece in there…and we kept trying to figure out ways to get over the fence and into the lot. No luck.
Ashley and Tom moved away moved away when I was about 8 years old. The neighborhood was getting steadily worse. We were in one of the only safe pockets of Williamsburg. This was right before it began to turn around and become one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city.
Things changed. My sisters and I didn’t play outside as much…the old Italian people who would sit outside moved away, or died.
Whenever I would pass the ceramic in the sidewalk, I would stop and look at it for a bit. Remembering. Imagining.
The neighborhood changed. I grew up, slowly but surely. I didn’t walk down Withers Street in that direction very often…and when I did, I was hurrying to get somewhere.
When I started high school, I passed the ceramic in the sidewalk every day on my way to the train station. Usually I was rushing to school, but sometimes I would stop and remember the summer evenings spent exploring.
That piece of cement came to symbolize part of my childhood. The magic of firefly filled summer nights of my childhood. (I have yet to figure out what the fireflies are doing in the streets of Brooklyn). A more innocent time.
This morning, that piece of cement holding that fragment of my childhood was attacked by a team of jack-hammer-wielding construction workers. The sidewalk is nothing more that a shallow pit, a pile of cement rubble, and a cloud of cement-dust. A “sidewalk closed, pedestrians use other sidewalk” sign stopped my way. The noise hurt my ears.
It was found on a summer’s day, and it’s gone on summer’s day, about 10 years later.
I’ll be 19 in October. Things change. I’ve changed. My neighborhood has changed. It was naïve of me to think that that slab of concrete would remain unchanged, but I still feel like I’ve lost something important, something magical.
It was like finding out there’s no Santa Claus, or Tooth Fairy all over again. It’s like realizing that the movies you loved as a child are kind of cheesy, the jokes you thought were brilliantly hilarious were rather dopey (Knock Knock, who’s there? Banana…) It’s when you look at the photos of yourself as a child, and see your (then) favorite shirt/skirt/shoes/shorts/hat/pajamas/etc. was horrible. When you see someone that you remembered as tall and strong barely reaches your shoulders.
It’s that part of growing up that kind of hurts. Things that you wish you could hold on to and keep forever unchanged as a reminder, as a sanctuary or haven from the pressures of life, slip away. Memories and photographs fade.
So this reflection was inspired by nostalgia…a cry for a lost childhood monument (if you will). Wouldn’t it be nice if we can make all those things historical landmarks? Keep them unchanged for eternity?
But life doesn’t work that way.
In the end, it’s a sidewalk. A sidewalk with memories, love, mystery, whimsy and magic imbedded in its particles, but it’s still just a sidewalk all the same…
In the poignant words of John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels:
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go
I just have to let it go.
Love,
Natalia
