Brooklyn Meditation
After months of hibernation with a new baby, we took a walk. Summer had come to New York a few days earlier, a slow tanker full of heat and steam. And then it had eased up a bit. A cool wind blew in and it rained a lot and when the rained stopped the skies were a comforting grey and there was enough of a chill to the air that you wanted to throw a soft summer sweater over your tank top. Perfect weather. So we took a walk to a different neighborhood. And it wasn’t until I saw Ft. Greene that I realized how much I hate Park Slope.
The best way to describe Park Slope is to say that there are three shoe stores on the main shopping street, and they all sell comfortable shoes. At any given moment during the day the sidewalks are choked with strollers –umbrella strollers, RV-like double-wides with sun shades and bottles and rainbow colored toys hanging off the sides, luxury strollers that hog the pavement and require the strength of a thousand mothers to push, car seats snapped into stroller frames whisking tightly swaddled newborns down the street. There are strollers with boogie boards attached on back so the older sibling can hop a ride while the younger child gets pushed around, strollers with little pockets in back for tethering infant-sized baskets of sleeping baby, triple strollers for triplets or twins with a random sibling. Babies are pushed around the neighborhood, Pharaoh-like, sleeping or eating or demanding or crying. They are flipped into reclining positions or propped upright and given cookies. They are bundled up tightly with blankets, even on the hottest days, so that all you see are their over-sized milk-fed noggins. Sometimes it seems like the streets are full of people pushing around huge heads in strollers.
Babies are like squirrels. One squirrel on its own is sort of cute. Look how it gnaws at that acorn, scampers up the tree, rolls over in the grass. Awww. Two squirrels: also cute, but less so. But fourteen squirrels, that’s an infestation. It’s disgusting. It’s the point where you start saying, isn’t there something we can do about the squirrel problem around here? And so it is with babies. One baby: cute. Two babies: also cute, but less so. Fourteen babies all in the same place at the same time makes me want to move to another neighborhood.
And so back to our walk. Our afternoon in the land of the baby-less. As we approached the stroller-free streets I felt my spine straighten. My hips swished a bit. I felt … sexy. Can a neighborhood make you feel sexy? This one did. There were couples kissing on the sidewalk. Single people easing their way through brunch at two in the afternoon. Friends chatting about the night before. And there, in the distance, another stroller. We lingered over arugula and smoked bluefish and then wound our way through the streets to the park where people were playing tennis.
“One kid is an accessory,” a friend of mine said to me recently. “Two kids is a lifestyle.”
We pushed our accessory back to our apartment, past people who were living the kid lifestyle. They were having block parties and watching from the stoop as their kids skidded across the street on assorted wheeled toys. They were padding down the street in comfortable shoes, wearing their babies on their hips and pushing their older children in double-wide strollers. They were buying organic baby food and fighting over who gets to sort the prunes at the Co-op. They were making me feel older than was really necessary.
The best way to describe Park Slope is to say that there are three shoe stores on the main shopping street, and they all sell comfortable shoes. At any given moment during the day the sidewalks are choked with strollers –umbrella strollers, RV-like double-wides with sun shades and bottles and rainbow colored toys hanging off the sides, luxury strollers that hog the pavement and require the strength of a thousand mothers to push, car seats snapped into stroller frames whisking tightly swaddled newborns down the street. There are strollers with boogie boards attached on back so the older sibling can hop a ride while the younger child gets pushed around, strollers with little pockets in back for tethering infant-sized baskets of sleeping baby, triple strollers for triplets or twins with a random sibling. Babies are pushed around the neighborhood, Pharaoh-like, sleeping or eating or demanding or crying. They are flipped into reclining positions or propped upright and given cookies. They are bundled up tightly with blankets, even on the hottest days, so that all you see are their over-sized milk-fed noggins. Sometimes it seems like the streets are full of people pushing around huge heads in strollers.
Babies are like squirrels. One squirrel on its own is sort of cute. Look how it gnaws at that acorn, scampers up the tree, rolls over in the grass. Awww. Two squirrels: also cute, but less so. But fourteen squirrels, that’s an infestation. It’s disgusting. It’s the point where you start saying, isn’t there something we can do about the squirrel problem around here? And so it is with babies. One baby: cute. Two babies: also cute, but less so. Fourteen babies all in the same place at the same time makes me want to move to another neighborhood.
And so back to our walk. Our afternoon in the land of the baby-less. As we approached the stroller-free streets I felt my spine straighten. My hips swished a bit. I felt … sexy. Can a neighborhood make you feel sexy? This one did. There were couples kissing on the sidewalk. Single people easing their way through brunch at two in the afternoon. Friends chatting about the night before. And there, in the distance, another stroller. We lingered over arugula and smoked bluefish and then wound our way through the streets to the park where people were playing tennis.
“One kid is an accessory,” a friend of mine said to me recently. “Two kids is a lifestyle.”
We pushed our accessory back to our apartment, past people who were living the kid lifestyle. They were having block parties and watching from the stoop as their kids skidded across the street on assorted wheeled toys. They were padding down the street in comfortable shoes, wearing their babies on their hips and pushing their older children in double-wide strollers. They were buying organic baby food and fighting over who gets to sort the prunes at the Co-op. They were making me feel older than was really necessary.
posted by Hana @ 10:58 AM
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