No Sleep Til Brooklyn...

Today is D's 40th birthday. Of all the many things I could give her: books, pens, a vegan dinner it is Brooklyn she wants. We are both daughters of Brooklyn, so I understand her.
I awake 5:30 am and despite the fact that I have been in New York for a week, it is only now that I am ready to venture into Brooklyn. It would be the first time in 2 ½ years that I will be seeing the borough of my birth.

When you were born, it snowed. It was March but there was so much snow.

D's plan is to walk into Brooklyn. We are both staying at Marie's—our agent/mentor in a cozy uptown brownstone jammed with books and other orphaned artists. D is dealing with not only the loss of her mother, but her lover and a family that has ostracized her. In many ways one could say that I am dealing with the same thing.

They have torn down the hospital in which you were born.

I have never walked over the Brooklyn Bridge before. I remember once, as a child, I attended one of its birthdays. My friend's mother took us, and I remember green grass and fireworks . I remember I was happy. But then again, there is nothing as unreliable as my memory. I had learned early in life that most things are better off forgotten.

D has made the trek over the Bridge countless of times before. But then again, D does not curse, she is consistent and quiet—three other ways in which we are unlike.

I had traveled to New York from Copenhagen, my home for the past 11 years, because my soul commanded it. I needed to be surrounded by an implicit comprehension of who I am. I also needed to see my 85 year-old grandmother who had explicitly traveled to Brooklyn from Trinidad, “to see the doctor.”

The last time I had seen my grandmother was four years before, when I had traveled to Trinidad with my son. On the way to Diego Martin from the airport the fact that she had alzheimers was dropped as nonchalantly as a sneeze. I remember how sad it had made me and how dispirited I had become when I bore witness to her general demise into a past which existed long before me. She was at the peak of her past memory.

But wait nah, who is this? Where Lesley gone?

One day in Trinidad, under the monotonous heat of the sun and the drone of the organized cacophony of Caribbean traffic, right outside of the bank we had just exited, my grandmother looked at me, her pink lipstick fading, her shock of white hair disheveled (her eyes however, strangely calm), “Here nah Lesley, what it is we just do in the bank?” The age-spotted hand she had placed at the side of her head to illustrate her confusion was stuff full of the bills she had only just withdrawn..

You know how Mammy is, she getting forgetful.

Sometimes I suspect that my grandmother's alzheimers is a summation of my family's inability to want to remember anything too messy, anything too revealing, anything too human, like the names of babies fathers and stolen articles.

But now I was here, in New York, my first time back without my son. I had imagined every night out, my getting drunk on the city of everything. But in the end, most nights ended with a glass of unfinished red wine on Marie's table full of pictures, magazines and books and my fast asleep on the couch.

But D and I awoke sometime after 5am. We dressed and boarded the train, downtown and exited at the financial district. This November was unusually mild. The sun shone and like everything else New York possibility abounded about and you are reminded just how all the world could be, possibly. It was the day of the Yankees Parade and families, businesswomen and students sported their Yankees gear. As we stepped onto the bridge bikes zipped past, a Chinese couple walked briskly by. Office workers dressed in skirts and sneakers buzzed past cars stuck in traffic.

“That is where the World Trade Center used to be,” D says to me, and we stand there, wondering at the gaping hole that was once part of a magnificent and boisterous skyline. D was there during September 11th, and like most of my friends who were, who experienced the impossibility of New York City coming to a standstill, she seems yet to get over it—understandably so.

There is something about the smallness I feel in New York City that is integral to me. There is something humbling about being around millions of people that reminds you of your smallness. Yes, it is a grand city, yes there is perhaps everything to be had there, but in the end, the sheer number of people and possibility only serve to magnify just how alone you really are.

“Welcome to Brooklyn” the inscription reads. I could have knelt down and kissed it.

D and I make our way to Forte Greene. It is the neighborhood she spent most of her life, and where I lived a significant portion of mine—not to mention that my mother still lived there. When I lived there it was a healthy mix of Pratt students, project dwellers, Black middle class families and artists of many persuasions. We sat in a cafe and I witnessed dogs abounding in the park where once children played. A bespeckled manchild who looked like he should have been in Soho entered the cafe with a copy of Push in his hand. D and I looked at each other and smiled knowingly.

How do you describe walking into the building of your childhood and being silently rejected? That is not my story to write, but it is something I witnessed. And afterwards, the way that a friend cried on another friend's shoulder out of fear of facing her family. D asked, “You want me to come with you?” How could I decline support I so desperately needed then?

There are things are cannot write. Of trespasses done that forgiveness cannot erase but decency and loyalty silence. Such is life. You live long enough and one day you will be able to travel from Copenhagen to Brooklyn, to walk into the familiar home of your mother, to find her and your grandmother still in bed after noon, under the warmth of blankets, watching the television that is never shut off. You live long enough and you discover things about people, even mothers that challenge your ability to be humane. But you will always have the force of your grandmother, who is her mother, to demand that you act with grace. And I know that that is not a bad thing. You live long enough, you will crawl into that bed and lay next to your grandmother, and cry, and she will pat your head the same way she once did when you were a child. So what that you are 37? In the arms of your grandmother, you will always be her little, favorite grandchild and she?

She is now the old lady who no longer recognizes you.

Copenhagen, New Years Eve 09