A Cousin Encounter of Another Kind (Four)

(TO READ THE PREVIOUS ENTRIES TO THIS SERIES CLICK THE NUMBER BELOW)

                          ONE  TWO THREE

I boarded the N train in the city at 57^th Street and 7^th Avenue. After a local stop or two the train emerged into the daylight.I could see the Brooklyn Bridge span over the East River through the window across from me, Just past the bridge, a looming Watchtower sign came into view. The last time I focused on these landmarks was on my TV screen, September 11, 2001, when thousands of Manhattanites mass exited the city. What looked Apocalyptic then, appeared as serene as a busy city could be serene on this sunny, humid morning.

Still, I could not keep myself from thinking What am I doing alone in this railroad car of strangers? Then I saw the chart of stops farther down the N line; ones that had a more familiar ring to them: Prospect Avenue, 59^th St., New Utrecht Ave., 86^th St. I remembered how my mother had so enjoyed wheeling her shopping cart in, through, and out of the small, Italian family-owned storefronts that lined 86^th Street and 18^th Avenue, before she became a reluctant Nutmegger. 

The train stops ran all the way down to Coney Island. It occurred to me: I might not only be trying to recapture the past. Maybe I was starting a future.
 

I followed my cousin’s instructions and got off at the Fort Hamilton station. I had planned to pick up a dozen cannoli  on the walk to his apartment. Within a half block I realized the 1950s “Little Italy” neighborhood I use to visit as a child had changed its milieu from Mediterranean to Far Eastern. Blueberry muffins from a Chinese bakery on 8^th Avenue would have to do.

My iPhone Navigation App measured just over a mile from where I stood to Cousin Joe's address. I walked the ascent of street numbers quickly; the avenues, not so much, in the increasing humidity. In about twenty minutes I phoned from the front steps of his four-family apartment house.

He answered, "Be right down". Said his sister, the driver in the family, would pick us up on the stoop. Now there was a Brooklyn word: stoop. In Brooklyn, neighbors sat on stoops - in New England, porches.

(to be continued - just one or two more .....really!)

 

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Eleven Years Since 9-11, a Commemorative Poem

In recent years I've written essay after essay. I haven't written a poem, I think, in decades,  until today, the 11th Anniversary of 9-11.

 LESSON UNPLANNED

 

Above my porch today,

as bright a blue and cloudless sky

as the crystalline view through my classroom window,

eleven years ago,

shines.

 

Second period of that past brilliant day,

a gangly group of sophomores held, for the first time

the story of the Finches: Scout, Jem and Atticus,

in their hands.

 

The promise of a new school year wrapped in the promise of the still fresh millennium.

At my classroom door,

 a teacher on hall duty appeared.

“ Did ya hear?”  he, by nature not an interrupter, asked.

“A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.”

 

“How unlucky:

 a misguided plane,

a planeful of passengers,

the business men and women,”

I remarked, before,

back to our paperbacks, I continued to read aloud  how

“Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself,”

on page 11.

 

And before I could finish Chapter One

of the  American classic

the not-by-nature-an-interrupter

appeared at my door again

with news of a second plane,

calling  crash number one
 
the first  domino of deliberately staged disaster,

a chain still reacting as he spoke.

 

And  I, a rarely-deviate-from-the-lesson sort of instructor,

switched from the planned introduction of classic fiction

to the live drama of Brokaw on the classroom TV

designating the Big Apple  the epicenter of epic tragedy.

 

A grandmother now,

I sit on my porch

and gaze at the similar  blue heavens,

never having forgotten how quickly  bright cloudless Day

can turn to monochromatic Night

filled with the swirling smoke and ash of buildings and human debris.

” Never again,” I  pray,

compelled to linger by this September's fading zinnias,

hoping that the butterflies will still come.