Breaking Bread in the Bronx

New York is so big. Then there’s the Bronx.

My late dad grew up there. Yesterday was his birthday.

This is a borough I know nothing about. Oh, I’ve been to the zoo and the Botanic Garden. But that’s different.

To get an authentic feeling about a place you need to walk its streets, see its people, and, most of all, eat its food.

Which is why I boarded the D train Friday bound for Arthur Avenue. I’d always wanted to go. 

This part of the Bronx is old school, a New York I remember from childhood, when we lived in Queens. Pre-war apartment buildings, an occasional clapboard house, open windows.

When I got to the Arthur Avenue Retail Market, I found Mike’s Deli and the counter women who were very enthusiastic when asked about the best chicken sandwich they could recommend. A cutlet with fresh mozzarella and roasted peppers? I was in! Add a cappuccino, which I sipped while I ate and listened to a couple of gents speaking in Italian next to me. I could not believe how easily I’d discovered my new happy place.

Oh, did I mention how Mike gave me a lesson in how to “bathe” my mozzarella?

After, I walked the avenue and bought a pound of espresso, as well as chocolate from Piemonte at Cerini Coffee and Gifts, and breads with prosciutto and olives at Addeo Bakers. Last stop was Madonia Brothers Bakery for chocolate lace Florentine cookies. My bag was brimming. I had to cut myself off so I could haul the load home.

On the way to the subway, a mother and small child were dancing to music at an outdoor barbeque.

I love these summer days, when I get to be a tourist in my hometown.

Happy Birthday Dad. I salute your roots.

A Child of the Subway

One of the delightful parts of writing is research.

For my current short story collection, a character and his girl board a subway for a beach day at Coney Island.

However, it’s the 1950s and New York City subways didn’t have letters. What to do?

Too much information on the web? Always go to the source. Which is how I found myself on a hot afternoon descending the stairs to the cool underground of the New York Transit Museum.

Not only did I have a delightful conversation with an employee, but he was kind enough to refer me to the research team that supports folks like myself.

“Oh,” I mentioned before leaving, “I can’t tell you how happy your promo video made me.”

 Children learning about the subways? And buses? I was a child of the subway. Still am.

Yes indeed, doing research is delightful.

The City Lives of Others

There’s a certain summer sound you rarely hear in New York. 

When I was a kid, you heard it all the time. Someone was playing a musical instrument, heard through an open window.

Often it would be from across a courtyard; it might be a piano, or saxophone. Sometimes it would be vocals, practiced by an opera singer. When I moved to my current home it was a performer of show tunes.

Rear Window is a masterpiece of certain summer sounds, as among other things you hear the composer practicing on his upright piano. The sounds are, of course, muted because they are not in the room with wheelchair-confined James Stewart, but what Hitchcock does brilliantly is capture the city lives of others, in an era before air conditioners, when you could hear the birds and the tinkling of a piano, as I did the other day while walking to the subway.

Sometimes summer sounds still survive.

Field Trip

In a short sorry I’m writing a character walks along Greenwich Avenue and spots a rooftop water tank.

A conversion ensues with his girl about a childhood memory.

I recently visited the location to determine where the building with said tank would be. Currently such a building does not exist.

I stood. I looked. I argued with myself. Then I remembered. It’s fiction. I can write anything I want.

That’s the beauty of the form. The ability to take liberties.

It’s all in the details