Friday September 3, 2021; 1:03 PM EDT
- These past two days have been the most beautiful in NYC this year. Many of my fellow local journalists seem to have spent them denouncing people on Twitter. My kids pulled me out of all that. They wanted to join me on my daily run. Nothing like pushing a double-wide stroller around Prospect Park at 6mph to snap you back into sunny, sweaty reality!#
- It also helped that I had a 5am shift at the local co-op. Up at 3:30, and walking through Park Slope in the wake of Ida an hour later. The low ebb of the neighborhood at that hour is lovely. Not empty, just slow, even peaceful, which you don't get much, even in Brooklyn, even in the park. Anyway, apparently the co-op's basement, where the food backstock is kept, flooded during the storm. Not the worst impact of the storm by a long shot, some New Yorkers lost their lives. #
- At the co-op, the water didn't touch the food because everything is kept at least six inches off the floor, usually on plastic pallets that are everywhere down there. They had drained it by the time my shift started, but were still dealing with the residual water. Eventually they'd have to clean the floors with bleach. But it was too early for any of us member workers to help. The truck traffic (my job is usually unloading pallets of produce coming off the trucks) was light due to the weather, and pecifically due to accidents that backed up post-storm traffic. #
- This is pretty much my life — the square mile or so around my apartment in south Park Slope ("South Slope") Brooklyn. I love it. This sort of focus is very healthy for me. The pandemic has intensified these confines, which can feel claustrophobic, mostly within the walls of my apartment, and only from time to time. But one thing I've learned about New York in the seven years since I moved here is that most New Yorkers live "small" lives, geographically, like this, even before the pandemic. It doesn't mean your life isn't very rich and "big" in other ways. But until I moved here I had no idea how far 10 blocks really feels, once you live here. That's maybe a 10 minute walk. At a certain point you develop this attitude of, "how much better could something be, some store or restaurant or whatever, that it's worth going beyond the three or four blocks I'm really comfortable visiting?" Especially when in those three or four blocks, in New York, there can be quite a lot.#
- I like to think I picked a good little area for myself. South Slope still has a soul. Pete Hamill, whose journalism inspired me when I was kid, grew up two blocks down, and briefly lived about a block up my street. He wrote a whole memoir about this neighborhood (and about his relationship with alcohol). My landlord, who must be 90, knew Pete since they were kids. You won't find many New Yorkers who will speak well of their landlords, but mine is a decent guy, at least these days, who helped promote and develop this corner of Brooklyn. There is a great gym across the street at the old armory, a spectacular YMCA, that our outgoing mayor had a hand in saving, and where I was sort saved myself, although that's a story for another day. We have three great bars, which is important, each distinctively great - the Double Windsor for good food and beer and people a little like me; Farrell's, the oldest bar, and with a crowd of people a little unlike me (a lot of cops, for example); and American Cheese, a total dive that's open late. #
- There's Cafe Grumpy, my coffee shop since our first morning here, fresh off a cab ride from JFK, with a seventh month old and no plates or silverware, our coffee pot left behind in Berkeley.#
- And then there's the park, the irreplaceable Prospect Park. And the co-op. And the new cheese store. And the new bakery that's the one thing the food critics like in our neighborhood (it is indeed good). And on and on. It's nice to have a neighborhood. Sure beats Twitter.#