Brooklyn on my mind

I restarted Les Miserables and I wasn't going to pick up another book until I was finished. Until... Halsey Street by Naima Coster showed up in the December Amazon First Reads selection. I wondered, did Halsey Street refer to the street in Brooklyn? I quickly went to read the description.

"A modern-day story of family, loss, and renewal, Halsey Street captures the deeply human need to belong—not only to a place but to one another.

Penelope Grand has scrapped her failed career as an artist in Pittsburgh and moved back to Brooklyn to keep an eye on her ailing father. She’s accepted that her future won’t be what she’d dreamed, but now, as gentrification has completely reshaped her old neighborhood, even her past is unrecognizable. Old haunts have been razed, and wealthy white strangers have replaced every familiar face in Bed-Stuy."

Brooklyn is in the front of my mind lately as I prepare to sell my family home. The home that has been in my family since sometime in 1935. Just from the description, I was drawn in by connections to my own personal life. I (temporarily) moved back to Brooklyn when my father became ill. And the Brooklyn I returned to was not the Brooklyn that I'd left over 35 years ago. (And maybe it's not everyone... but do most people not get the future that they've dreamed of?)

I immediately downloaded the book, scrapped reading Les Miz for the second time and started reading Halsey Street.

I've never actually been on Halsey Street although for some reason that name is etched in my mind. Did I ever know anyone that lived on Halsey Street? I'm not really sure. It's in a neighborhood that I wouldn't have dared visiting alone as a kid growing up in Brooklyn (although I do think a friend's mother took me to that neighborhood more than once or twice). Now, it's just another neighborhood where the folks who have been living there a long time are being priced out of and forced to move. Just like many other neighborhoods in Brooklyn and other urban centers. Adult children of my friends are living there. Most likely, I couldn't afford to live there. So there!

That's a part of the story of Halsey Street.

There's lots of darkness and very little light in the debut novel. My initially reaction was to give it three stars on goodreads.com because of how dark it can tend to be. (It became a little bit difficult to read at some of those points.) I wondered if anyone I knew would enjoy this book. But is that a reason for me to give a book 3 stars when in my gut I felt it deserved 4? I went in and changed my rating this morning.

Rather than give you a straight out review, I'm going to comment on some of the lines in the book that really spoke to me.

The houses where I grew up in California are hardly ever this beautiful. The designs are so garish and cold. But there's so much history in these brownstones. It must have been a magical place to grow up.

My family house which was built in 1910 has so many interesting features. They sure don't build houses like that anymore. I'm sure the people who are buying our house are going to make major changes. Will they destroy the character? They can't touch the history, can they? And about that history. We're not talking about just my history, but my grandparents' history, moving there as young parents. The history of my mom and her sister, growing up in that house. My parents' history. Taking over the house as newlyweds and then inheriting the house when my grandmother died. The childhood history of my brother and me. Was he as anxious to leave Brooklyn as I was? And of course the history of my kids, most especially my son who lived in the house as an adult  for over 2 years.

Was it a magical place to grow up? I know that Penelope doesn't believe Bed-Stuy was magical when she grew up. It's only now as an adult that I can see some of the magic in my upbringing. I compare it to where I raised my children, in suburban New Jersey. But I think about how my upbringing, if more magical, was only more magical because of the time period when I grew up and not because of the location.

Penelope gathered her new set of keys from the floor and left to see her father. The house was just a few blocks over, and Penelope wanted to see if the other streets were as quaint as Greene and Bedford. Ralph had narrated the changes in the neighborhood to her over the phone, five years' worth of losses. His store wasn't the only one that had closed. Lionel Sheckley wasn't the only friend who had died. Almost everyone was gone, he said. He hardly recognized Bed-Stuy.

 

Each time I return to Brooklyn, I need to go for a walk in the neighborhood. I carefully study which streets seem well-kempt, which don't. (I seriously think the homeowners on our block in Midwood took a pact to not upgrade the outsides of their houses. Compared to other streets where bricks have been repointed, vinyl siding has been replaced with some other face. Gardens are not just well-tended but beautifully appointed.

I try to remember what's been changed. On my last visit "home" I was struck by what the schoolyard at the end of my block looked like. It looks like a park. I spent so many years playing on the concrete and dry dirt in the schoolyard. We used it as a park, although it was never park-like! I also walked around the block to examine the construction of new homes taking place behind us. Is that what is going to happen to our house?

And what about the neighbors? I'm fortunate to have many of my old neighbors as friends on Facebook. We're getting reacquainted as adults but take time to remember the "magical" place where we grew up. I'm hard pressed to think of any of my neighborhood friends from growing up that still live in the neighborhood. Or even Brooklyn. Or even NYC. By the time my parents died in 2014, almost everyone they had been friendly with had died. I guess that's a common story.

And she'd thought herself fortunate, compared to her classmates in Bed-Stuy; for the first time, at RISD, Penelope wondered whether she had been poor. She quickly realized she hadn't been, although her mother had, and her father, when they were children.

My experience wasn't quite as extreme as Penelope's. Growing up, I thought we might be rich. We traveled to Miami regularly, took a road trip most summers, and from time to time we'd go somewhere like the Bahamas and California and stay in a hotel. We belonged to a beach club. That's more than many of my classmates did. It wasn't until I got to college and met some real rich people that I realized we fell somewhere in the middle class. My parents' upbringings had been very different from my own. In some ways richer, in many ways more deprived.

They found a table by the window in a cafe on Nostrand Avenue. It was a new restaurant with yellow curtains...

Cafe? Nostrand Avenue? That doesn't really compute. I'm constantly surprised by what previously unimagined businesses have cropped up on what street. In my Brooklyn. In the parts of Brooklyn I didn't dare go to as a teen.

"Revitalization. They're revitalizing the neighborhood." He made big swoops with his fingers, quotation marks around the word revitalize.

"It's still Brooklyn, Pop."

"Maybe on the surface. But what about inside, hmm?" Ralph gestured over his shoulder at the rest of the restaurant. Most of the other customers were talking over their lunches, nearly all of them white. They weren't the majority outside on Nostrand but they were in here, congregated around the little tables.

That's Brooklyn!

Penelope felt a charge in her fingertips, her cheeks. "Is that what you see?"

"Penelope, I get it, people have all kinds of romantic attachments to where they grew up, but that's life in this city. You lose everything you love here."

"What have you lost? What has Marcus?"

"At least, the three of us in this room can all benefit from the changes-"

But can everyone benefit from the changes? My neighborhood has changed. I don't remember how long it's been since we haven't fit in. Is there hope, possibilities, for us there? There are now two Starbucks within walking distance, but on the outskirts. It's still not a Starbucks kind of neighborhood. That sounds so shallow. I don't mean it to. We need to keep reminding us that the Brooklyn that we're finally "leaving" isn't the Brooklyn where we grew up. That brings up another internal conflict for another day.

She felt sad not that she had lost something but rather that her mother had - Ramona had loved her life, her pipe and her blue casita and her mountain. Mirella was sorry the old woman wouldn't live any more of the days she had loved so much. She was sorry for Penelope, too, afraid she would be unable to stop crying, the way Mirella had been after her father died. She had cried every day for a year, and then only once in a while, abruptly and for no reason at all, at times that seemed to have nothing to do with her father. And then Mirella learned to put away her sadness, to store it in her body, somewhere out of the way, higher than her stomach, below her throat.

This spoke to me simply because I'm selling the house because my parents have died. In some ways the sale of the house is more difficult than the death of my parents. It's just so much more FINAL. As we age, we kind of assume that our parents will die before we do. That's the natural order. But when you've had a family home, you never stop to consider that once both your parents are gone, the family home will most likely be gone, too. Especially if it's in a changed neighborhood. A neighborhood where you no longer feel you have a place.

If you've stuck with me so far, this last quote is very meaningful to me. It made me smile and get teary-eyed, both at the same time. The final line I'm going to share with you is reminiscent of what my mother said to me nearly every single day when I spoke to her on the phone.

Ralph laughed when Penelope called, asked her about Pittsburgh, and promised her he was "fine, just fine."

That was my mother's exact line. Exactly. Parents lie.

Thank you for reading to the end of this very long post. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post telling you that I felt like writing rather than reading. Reading this book has allowed me to do a little bit of the writing I've been itching to do. Just a little bit. And I was reading at the same time.

Now... back to Les Miserables. I think.