And pickles are just pickles

29 11 2009

Russ & Daughters makes great pickles. Sour, with a corona of heat around the edge of each bite.

That’s a pickle.

Russ & Daughters is one of the remnants of the late 19th/early 20th centuries still living in the early 21st: they and Katz’s Deli (packed with tourists as I sidled by) are among the few outposts of the great Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side, each nailed into a corner on Houston.

They’re both north of the Williamsburg Bridge, and a few blocks beyond Delancey—does this make them a part of the East Village rather than the LES? I’m no umpire, here, but they’re tugged from behind by the LES; the other side of Houston heads toward a city far beyond the modesty of the LES.

Or former modesty. The Lower East Side is, as everywhere in Manhattan, bending under the influx of money and cool. Not completely—there are sites in the LES and even the East Village which are more rather than less dodgy, and few would argue that the F and JMZ lines are among the city’s best—but gentrification creeps on.

It’s Manhattan. The desire for the Next Great Deal will always out.

I shouldn’t romanticize either the East Village or the LES. I’ve been in some of those apartments, and they’re awful: tiny, dark, and likely to lack basic amenities (such as, say, a sink in the bathroom). The streets are close together, so lower level windows likely never see sun. And twenty-five years ago ‘Alphabet City’ was a warning against trespassing beyond First.

But they (and the Bowery—why not?) used to be places. Not always good places, but there was something more to them than just. . . well, money.

Money is dull. Don’t get me wrong—I could certainly use more of it—but in and of itself it all-too-often adds nothing but that which caters to it. It doesn’t have to be that way, but money makes it too easy to be lazy in one’s tastes. What can I get? What can I buy? What is everyone else getting and buying?

Lack of money is never dull. Poverty or fear thereof can certainly dull one’s sensibilities, especially in a city (or a country) where money is IT!, but sometimes, sometimes, the lack of money drives those so lacking to seek pleasures and meanings beyond that literal coin of the realm.

Again, I shouldn’t romanticize: So many of those who lived in and constituted the history of these neighborhoods scuffled and hustled and did whatever they could to escape those places. They wanted the money they saw flowing from the pockets of those living further uptown. And my own skepticism of community ought to force me to scrape away the sepia from what could be a violent and oppressive past.

But I miss what was there, what is gone. It’s in large measure the cheap nostalgia of the passer-by: the one who strolls through and marvels and doesn’t have to live in the dim and the dank.

But there was life beyond—within—the dim and the dank, a life unseen by the mere passer-by. The people who lived in these neighborhoods were visible in the streets, but there was something more which connected these people to the tenements and narrow streets and one another.

Perhaps it’s still there, or somewhere, in this city. Perhaps I need to open my eyes and see what’s here, now. There is always something more.


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All alone in the moonlight

1 11 2009

I take back everything I said.

Well, not everything.

And I don’t really take it back.

Let me, shall we say, add to what I wrote in the last post.

Memory matters to me. I don’t want to get ensnared in it, but I don’t want to forget, either.

I don’t want to live in those memories, don’t want to act as if that’s where my life really is or belongs. I’m not about to head off to my first day of first grade.

But that was once me. I did once wear dresses my mom made, wear ponytails (which I preferred to pigtails, i.e., knots worn high above the ears) and barrettes, and smile into the sun and for the camera.

Today I only occasionally wear my hair in a single ponytail, only occasionally smile into the sun, and rarely for the camera.

This isn’t a paean to lost innocence. I was six then and am some decades past six now. I grew up, and am glad for that.

I lost a lot along the way, as does every person who makes the trek from child- into adulthood, and have gained, as well. Again, nothing unusual about that.

And I guess that’s what I do need to remember, that there is nothing unusual about this—that I do have a past in addition to a present and likely a future. This is what it is to be a modern adult.

But I also have to remember that I have as much and as little control over that past as I do my future. I can’t always call up memories at will, can’t always place them when they do surface, and don’t always know what to do with them. Good, bad, happy, sad, indifferent—doesn’t matter. They’re there and they’re gone and they sometimes come back.

And in coming and going they carry pieces of me with them.

I live here, now, but I don’t yet understand what it is to live here, now, and to move into my future. No, I don’t want, per my last post, to get stuck in a cul-de-sac of my past, but I can’t and don’t want to erase it, either.

Not anymore, at least: I have tried, and failed, to erase it. If you don’t think you belong in life, it’s only a hop to the belief that you need to erase all evidence of your self, if only in yourself.

But now I’m re-constructing my life, re-claiming it. I have no idea what I’m doing, not sure of these pieces which come both bidden and not so, not sure of my. . . hopes? possibilities? for the future.

(And, oh yes, I can carried away by the future, as well; what finer form of escapism than to think But later, after. . . ?)

Neither my past nor my future is under as much control as my present, and even my present is under less control than I would like (tho’ I do admit that that’s not wholly a bad thing).

Still, I am here, now, which means making what sense I can of who I was, then.

Or at least recognizing that I was, then.


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