And You Want to Follow Blind Saturday, January 26, 2008

While I was transferring files over to the new host, I glanced over some earlier entries--as in, the first few weeks of Wrong Turning--and I was surprised at how gentle and reflective it sounded. I don't know what happened to me in the meantime. Apparently there was some kind of conflict overseas.

In honor of those hopeful first posts, here's some diarizing.

We moved to this town two and a half years ago, and I'm still getting used to the culture. Faithful readers will recall our last hometown was Bayonne, a blue-collar town butting up against a bunch of hipster havens--Hoboken, Jersey City, what have you. The closest thing to metro culture was a coffee shop done up in a Starbucks palette. As for demographics, it was largely Italian and Polish, and, as Gabe Kaplan said of Florida, the average age is deceased.

Our current homestead is the reverse: Lots of young parents, lots of emigres who ran out of room in Park Slope and Red Hook. They've brought some of the culture with them. We live on the let us say less desirable end of town, and right around the corner we've got two coffee shops and an earthy-crunchy toy store. For the most part, the hipsters are buying houses from Italian widows and older black families; the hippies, who gave the town its cachet in the first place, seem to be staying put.

We bought our place from a lady in an asylum. It's at the top of a hill, one of the big thighbusters in town, but we still seem to be underwater every time it rains. Our neighbors are a mix of the youngsters mentioned above and a mix of old-liners: again, Italians and middle-class black folks.

At this point, you're probably waiting for the punchline. But the truth is, I love it here. We have a small, disorderly house and a great life. Our neighbors have never been less than friendly, the kids are sweethearts (the usual meltdowns aside), and the institutions have their charm, even if I wouldn't have set the same agendas. Put it this way: Bayonne felt familiar to me--exactly like the town where I grew up--but it never felt like home. This town does.

It also feels much more fragile here. I was never afraid of losing our house in Bayonne, but our overhead is a lot steeper here. The mortgage costs are nearly double, gas is eighty bucks a week now, and the good-hearted monster in our second bedroom is eating us out of house and home. Fortunately, I feel like I'm scaling back a little. I don't find myself grabbing for (as many) shiny things anymore. I like buying toys more than I like buying CDs. Ideally, I'd like giving to charity even better, but come on, I'm a work in progress.

More later. If you don't hear from me, I got caught in the crossfire at the Cowboy Songs for Kids concert.

@ 5:27:00 AM,

1 Comments:

At 11:54 AM, Blogger Pete said...

I thought reviewing old posts was for losers!

 

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