Haunting in Brooklyn

I am trying to get back into running. I did just shy of three miles in two block intervals in just over 30 minutes. Walk a block, run two, the street blocks not the Avenues. It was easy and I got a good sweat going and I feel like I am building back up to the five mile plodder I once was.

As I do my thing today, I think about my Grandfather. Actually he has been on my mind a lot since I moved back to New York.

He grew up in the Bronx.

I am not sure where exactly.

I would like to know.

It would give me an excuse to go up there and walk around his old neighborhood and try to imagine what it would have been like, prewar, and all. I am sure not much prewar architecture remains though. I hate to imagine what I’d find. I think I remember hearing it was near Yankee Stadium, but my memory is like Swiss cheese.

After the war he moved to Brooklyn and started having babies in the Fort Hamilton Parkway area. I realized shortly after moving to Park Slope that Fort Hamilton Parkway runs not too far from where I am currently living.

I discovered this while accidently running 6 miles.

I started out thinking I would do one course, much shorter and ended up running around Greenwood cemetery and bam right there is a road sign telling me I was on the Fort Hamilton Parkway. Along it somewhere my Grandparents started their family before giving up on city life and moving to the potato farms of Long Island.

He was a hard worker, my grandfather. He fixed planes during the Second World War and retired from the post office in the late seventies and passed comfortably in Florida surrounded by loved ones.

I was not there. I wish I had been. I was engaged to a bad year at that point in my life. A bad year that would last another 8 months. Bad decisions, with horrible outcomes, not as bad as It could have been, but bad enough to forever alter the landscape of my life and bad enough to put me in another state as my Grandfather lay dying.

He painted beautifully, my Grandfather. He always had a canvas on his easel. He painted in oils. Must have done hundreds of pieces during his life. I have hung pieces of his work up in some of the places I have lived. I don’t own any today. I was proud to be related to those works by blood. I wondered often why he had been a postal worker and not a professional artist.

Malcolm Gladwell helped me realize that I was watching a master at work, one who had devoted his ten thousand hours of practice, but it took him 70 plus years to accumulate in-between doing the right things for his family.

My Grandfather had the artistic temperament. Meaning he had a temper with a low boiling point, like me and my brother, loud and some of the things he could say, Jesus, but he was smart and never violent. One thing he told me many times as a child, especially after a subpar report card, or an in school fight, or call home from the principal’s office, would be that the world needs street sweepers and ditch diggers as much as it needs doctors and lawyers.

This statement haunts me today, it hurt me then also, because I didn’t want to dig ditches, or sweep streets.

I still don’t.

I have dug ditches though. Of course I did it in the Army, but then after also, once. I helped dig three gigantic holes into which concrete was poured. On top of those gigantic holes filled with concrete some other team placed a cell phone tower.

The holes were dug on a farm in Georgia. A huge piece of land. I tried to talk to the engineer about the details of the assignment and as little as he shared he did tell me the property owners could live comfortably off the rental agreement from this tower alone for the rest of their lives.

How lucky. They had land someone must have used a shovel on at some point and now they get to live comfortably for the rest their lives while that tower hums its signal out into the world connecting cellphones.

Some people are lucky, or work hard or have to use a broom professionally, whether they want to or not.

I have used tools that have blistered by hands and left wounds that took weeks to heal.

I have done this, that and the other thing so often I am tired of the repeats.

My brain is blistered from the mundane and repetitious life I seem to be living. I am trying hard to think up something different. Find some path hidden from view. Most of all I hope with all my soul I have not relegated myself to ditch digger or street sweeper.

I sure as hell am not going to be a Doctor or lawyer either.

I am not quite sure whats left.