Bronx Skies

"We all suffered from the same shortage of vocabulary, as if language itself had fled the Bronx, and curiosity had been bleached out of us. School was of little help. Our teachers had succumbed to the neighborhood’s affliction, a kind of constant, sluggish sleep." From an article in the City section of The NY Times this Sunday, by Jerome Charyn, novelist and Bronx native.

On quiet days when I work at home, I sometimes take a few minutes to sit by the window that looks out onto the street in front of our building. The view is a waterproofing company's warehouse, Bruckner Blvd., the on-ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, billboards billboards billboards... and quite a lot of sky. I can see what kind of traffic day it is; and it always seems that people are driving away from here, as fast as they can.

Sometimes I really have no idea what I'm doing here. Lately I've begun to imagine living somewhere else - a different borough, a smaller city, perhaps even a small town. This morning the pup and I walked under the bridge (a spooky underpass) to the handball courts, where I sometimes take him to toss the tennis ball around; but a shady-looking guy was sitting on the curb there, with no one else in sight, and I didn't feel safe. Ho hum.

This is where I am, for now. Half the time, anyway. When I sit by the window, I think about this: this is where I am. Somehow, I got here. And this is where I am.

It's not much of a pedestrian's neighborhood (shady-looking guys, etc.), so when I'm here, I'm mostly inside. Grocery shopping, miscellaneous errands, these things are accomplished mostly by driving to somewhere else. The other night we stopped in at a Puerto Rican restaurant a few blocks away and flumoxed the two women at the counter with our non-Spanish. I do find delight in seeing the Korean dry cleaners' and the Chinese takeout owners' faces light up when we walk in.

So I learn about my borough in tiny tidbits. It's a huge borough, its history of people groups diverse. But when it comes to writers, the Bronx is very much the un-Brooklyn: writers flock to Brooklyn as the new literary enclave, while they overcome obstacles and flee the Bronx for brighter skies (Delillo, Doctorow, etc. - Mr. Charyn now lives in Manhattan, I believe, and Paris.)

Here's another one, which I ran across I don't remember where. A self-published memoir by James McSherry called A Clean Street's a Happy Street. "A well-crafted and poignant memoir about a chaotic childhood in the Bronx," the review says. The title struck me, because of the garbagey-ness around here. I'll see if I can get my hands on the book.