Does it snow in Brooklyn?
Yesterday a friend told me she was thinking about moving to Brooklyn. “Back to Brooklyn,” was the way she put it; her mother, aging, needs her. “Besides, it’s all very different,” she said. “It’s been re-done is so many ways. It’s beautiful.”
I pictured the little of Brooklyn I remember of recent years. A specific year, really, when John’s friend Bill drove me through. He’d picked me up at JFK, this friend from a past not even my past, and we were on our way to Prospect Park to meet Peter, another friend.
The occasion was the men, the friends, my son’s college classmates, had planted a tree in my son’s honor and we were to see it, together, at the park.
As I look back, I see the rarity of that day, that experience. Bill, a kind man, an artist, narrated the streets of Brooklyn as we drove through, noting the brownstones, the coffee shops, the bustle and elegance of it all. I tried to be –not charming, that would have been a stretch—but a woman, a classmate’s mother—worth having as a companion for the afternoon. I took in Brooklyn. I took in Bill, as well. He’d brought sandwiches and iced tea for us.
We met Peter and Emily at the park. We saw the tree, surrounded by a wire fence, with my son’s name on it. The experience, as people might say, was “unreal.” We stood quietly around the tree; we took pictures of one another, passing our cell phones back and forth. Such kind men. Their kindness superseded grief. The sun shone.
We drove to Bill’s art studio and exclaimed and admired. We walked into the sunshine and viewed the vast river, the city buildings, from there. It was quietly, comfortingly, companionable.
I returned with Peter and Emily to their grand home in a suburb north of the city, a house separated from the others so widely that one couldn’t see a neighbor’s house. This was along the Hudson River, the quiet of it all! The vast quiet. I slept in a room my son had slept in when he visited his friends a few times.
The next day we drove to Cambridge and met several other friends, my son’s friends from a distant past, wonderful men. We threw ashes in the Charles River, we walked through the campus, quiet in the sunshine, peaceful, a sense of peace.
I couldn’t thank the men enough. I wanted to keep them with me. Just stay, I thought. You loved him; I loved him; it all works when we are together.
We laughed into the peace of the afternoon. I laughed, something like happiness descending those rare days.
Now it’s now. I’ve been to New York, Manhattan, in the interim years. I’ve seen Bill; I’ve seen Peter and Emily. That was in the city—when I sought them out and they kindly, generously, responded.
But it’s been a while.
A tree grows in Brooklyn. John’s tree, somewhere there, growing. Peter took a picture of snow on the tree, so it does snow. I need to return – but they have their lives – and, one cannot capture the same quiet twice.