mallorys_camera | That Game You Used to Play

Went to the Halloween parade. It was very cold. Summer and Spring bailed on me, but there is a certain Masque of the Red Death fascination to wandering the streets of the ancient city solo, spying on revelers. No, I did not wear a costume myself.

brass

This part of Brooklyn is so tied up in my memories of my childhood.

I want to say that more has changed than has remained the same, but of course, I don’t know if that’s true. My memories are unreliable, and I’ve never really had the gift of separating out underlying architectures from facades.

I do remember that this verdigrised plaque on this unremarkable boulder was a source of endless, almost mystical fascination to me when I was six or seven years old.

The brass line was still there on the pavement. (It’s gone now.) And I was just entranced by the thought that I could stand in two places at the same time simply by straddling the brass line! They were two separate places – see? the words on the rock proved it! – and I had found a simple but effective way to circumvent the conservation of matter and occupy both places simultaneously just by standing with my right foot on one side of the brass line and my left foot on the other.

The boulder is in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, which is the ur-garden for me.

They charge admission to explore it now. They didn’t when I was a kid (thank goodness.)

My grandfather lived at 79 Lefforts Avenue in a neighborhood now known as Prospect Lefforts Gardens. As my mother was constantly dumping me at my grandfather’s house, I grew to know the neighborhood very, very well, and its landmarks took on some of the coiled emotional resonance of stations of the cross.

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I headed right to the gardens my first day here.

They looked different.

There was a very complicated game I used to play right here in the Cranford Rose Garden amidst the ancient flower bushes:

roses

The game was played with sticks. It was a very intricate game in which the sticks were people with complicated personalities, and their multigenerational interactions spanned centuries. Sometimes, even now, I’ll be taken aback by people I meet or news stories I hear, and I’ll think, I conjured you – you were a character in that game I used to play… I remember that quite clearly.

hassid

R____’s apartment is on the outskirts of Crown Heights. More ethnically diverse now than it was 60 years ago, but Kingston Avenue is still Ground Zero for the Hassid Lubavitch movement.

hassid2

Quite a few young punk Hassids, too. Meaning they have the forelocks, but they’re wearing teeshirts and carrying skateboards. Also many males in yamakas who are clearly not Hassids – I suppose they bear the same type of relationship to Hassids as Mennonites do to the Amish.