The Other Ocean

I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My parents were born in New York. My mom’s family have come to the United States in a steady trickle, starting in 1866, almost entirely from Western Ireland. But not just any part of the United States. They all moved to Brooklyn.

I have always taken pride in being from somewhere internationally recognizable. When I was a teenager, people thought of Brooklyn as a den of crime. A kid in Idaho overheard me talk about Brooklyn in the lunch line and thought I was going to steal his money.

But things changed. In the early 2000s, I knew something had shifted. I told a young woman I was from Brooklyn, and she said, “oh!” She said it in the way you would respond to an anticipated movie trailer, or a new favorite restaurant opening up, that kind of thing. And then I could almost feel it, the place I had wanted to return to all of my life was sliding out of reach.

Everyone who was in New York City during the 70s and 80s has stories like my family. Not the crime stories, of course we have those. I mean the near misses. Someone offered my dad a brownstone for $12,000. My grandmother’s siblings inherited houses (plural) in Park Slope and Sheepshead Bay, but lost them all to the tax man. Of jobs not taken, of elite schools they got into but didn’t attend, it goes on and on.

New York City is a city of opportunity, both seized and missed.

When I was writing my next novel, The States, I of course thought of all these things. My main character, Tildy, has a life that is nothing like mine. She’s from Manhattan, first of all. She’s also the child of an elite family, an heir in a cosmetics empire, whereas my mom worked double shifts as an ER nurse at various Brooklyn hospitals. But the longing Tildy feels for Galway, as if fate had stolen the very possibility of belonging to Ireland from her, that’s the part of me I poured into the book. I feel that way for some impossible Brooklyn from my dreams and memories. The one where older folks sat in woven folding chairs in the street, chatting with neighbors as they saved a parking spot for incoming relatives. Where my grandmother would take me to the library or Nellie Bly Amusement Park or the New York Aquarium, complaining about Robert Moses the whole time. Where every corner has family history – my great-grand uncle’s memorial from WWI, the facade my great-great-grandfather carved for the police station, the home where my grandmother was born. Tildy feels that way about Ireland, about the part of her family she wishes were her entire family.

It’s a sickness, this helpless desire to go backwards in time and return to a place of comfort. But it comes from love. I love Brooklyn. I had to grow to love it as it is now, and accept that there would be no huge family reunions with trad music waiting for me. But I’ll go back, someday soon, and make it my own again.

For now, I live where there are not enough bridges, and one of them is bright red.