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On the street near my apartment today, I was approached by a 30-something white man with a lazy eye, matted hair and frazzled beard, sporting a grey wool suit and tie (and toting a briefcase), yet looking as disheveled as if he'd slept on a bus for many, many hours that day.
Stranger: Thank you.
Me: Excuse me?
Stranger: I know you work very hard, so thank you.
Me: You're welcome.
Bizarre, yes, but one of the reasons I moved back to New York City was because strange encounters with every conceivable sort of human being are a part of daily life here. And I'd missed it.
Jason and I live in Brooklyn, not far from where I took my first breaths on Earth, a quick subway ride from Manhattan. Depending on which map you consult, our neighborhood is either Prospect Heights or Crown Heights. Call it what you like--it's a colorful, diverse neighborhood of mostly Caribbean blacks (Haitians, Jamaicans, etc.). Sushi may be hard to come by, but there is plenty of Creole, African and West Indian food. We hear French being spoken a lot (in fact, the cabbie who drove us home from JFK Airport was playing Edith Piaf the entire way).
If that's not diverse enough for you, walk a few blocks east and you're smack dab in the middle of the biggest enclave of orthodox Jews this side of Jerusalem. Seriously, you've never seen so much black wool in your life and there's a synagogue, religious school and dentist's office on every block. We are at the intersection of Jamaica and Jews, as my cousin Otto put it. The cholent capital of Brooklyn, if you ask my cousin Gill.
New York is a city of neighborhoods, as they say, and one of the things I'd missed most in my 4 years away was that genuine sense of community. People take their neighborhoods seriously here and--particularly in areas where people aren't swimming in cash--neighbors tend to lean on one another.
As with any neighborhood, you have your wackos and your assholes (like the portly teenager in my local market yesterday who lovingly told the cashier to "Go fuck your mama and your mama's mama"), but despite the fact that palefaces like me and Jason stick out like sore thumbs around here, we love the diversity and we've found our neighbors and local store owners to be friendly and accommodating; the neighborhood, charming. In fact, all around this area are beautiful brownstones that I'd bet are reasonably priced (by NYC standards, at least), meaning that student loan burden-holders like us might afford to be homeowners before we reach retirement age.
In the meantime, we have a wonderfully sunny fixer-upper apartment that we are happily fixer-upping (as Jason puts it). I have spent more hours at Target and Bed Bath & Beyond than I care to admit, but it's all part of the fun of making our house a home and settling in to our little corner of the melting pot.
Posted by ayelet at March 24, 2008 06:36 PM