On a beautiful Friday morning in June, walking up Joralemon Street to my office. Here in the late middle of life, kid in college, kid in high school, kids in middle school. The first of a neighbor's children getting married. My other neighbor going to Italy for two weeks. The other, heading for the summer home. We are still climbing out from the death of my wife's mom last summer, which sent us tearing back up the turnpike from our only vacation for the year after she suffered a massive stroke...8 years before the youngest are out of college and I am retirement eligible, but for now, no thought no freedom, no pleasure. .
Just "makin' shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot... I and I in creation's way man's nature neither honors nor forgives..."
The only brightness, for a moment, is in mixing with the downtown crowds, one of my favorite spots in Brooklyn, Joralemon between Boerum/Adams street and Court..the guys in front of the Brooklyn municipal building with their cameras and bouquets, waiting to snap pictures of happy brides and grooms coming for a marriage license and a civil ceremony...
...all of the messengers, attorneys, office workers, bureaucrats and power brokers, lining up at coffee wagons in the sunshine...the Yemenite fruit guys and Chasidic stationers, where else can you find four newstands within a few short blocks in Brooklyn..everyone with a little extra spring because it is Friday Friday Friday and we are all here and I think how I & I and we are all linked somehow back to that Brooklyn historicity...
...old Walt Whitman tromping these downtown Brooklyn streets in his day as we do in ours, the civil war raging then, as the Iraq trauma and maelstrom explode now....
I remember researching and learning that Walt Whitman lived around the corner from our former home in Clinton Hill when he wrote "Leaves of Grass"..We lived on Hall Street near Myrtle Avenue until 1999..I found the Whitman home, a little worknig man's townhouse like we had, three floors all wood..and what should be growing in front of the home, a lilac bush..."When lilac last in the dooryard bloom'd"
I don't know what the future will bring, just as I don't know what the past holds...the fog envelops, and through the haze I can only struggle to glimpse a few shadows of courtship, marriage, children, 1, 2, 3, 4...all laced with the travails of the workingman's life crammed in the strugle to keep my creativity and voice alive..meanwhile, parents die, friends and lovers disappear, and I am left with a few moments where I struggle to the surface in an effort to achieve clarity, and even if I fail, I am able to see, in the distance, despite the ultimate loneliness that is each of us our fate, some of the ties that bind...
Speak Memory...