Tourists in the Land of Our Youth – the 149th Street Reunion

You can’t go home again. You can’t step in the same river twice—the water moves on, the banks erode and grow, the very shape of the river changes. You can’t drop 49 years and become an 8-year old again, drop your cares, forget your responsibilities, undo the things you did that got you to this time, this place, the person you are now. But you can go back, with different eyes and see the past overlaid on the present.

I grew up at 90-11 149th Street, Jamaica, Queens, New York. A child of the 50’s, my father was a veteran who had lived in neighboring Briarwood, in a private house, until the Depression snatched it away and sent his family back to an apartment in Brooklyn. Newly married, he returned to Jamaica and rented an apartment on 90th Ave and then, after my sister was born, on 149th Street, a street that he once said was a tennis court when he was a boy. So going home again was already part of my family’s private mythology when I first arrived on the block.

A short, two-block long street, bounded on one side by Jamaica Avenue, dark under the El, and 90th Avenue on the other end, the street that led to King’s Park, one city block of grass, chestnut trees, and nature, where we all played. The street was 4 apartment buildings, with some stores at the Jamaica Avenue end, and Lowe Court at right angles to the middle of the block, with a couple of more apartments, including one where my mother’s parents moved shortly after my parents.

The street was filled with children, the gang of boys and girls my age shading into my sister’s group, who were two years and an entire generation younger, and the big kids, four or more years older than me, the first kids of the baby boom. They ignored us, they stole our footballs and Halloween candy, and they knew things we would never know simply by virtue of having lived them first. One day, I stuck my head out of the 5th floor window, looked down the street to the rattling El at the end and the buildings, the bricks, the scraggly trees, the sounds of traffic and stickball, the smell of the building incinerators and the street is forever burned into my memory as “When I was a boy.”

A week ago, for the reunion organized by the big kids, about 50 of us got together on the block, milling about the corner of 149th Street and Lowe Court, trying to recognize in the grownups the children we had been. Since the big kids organized it, most of the attendees were older than me. “Graying hair, beauty-parlor hair, and virtually no hair,” the New York Times unkindly put it. The Queens-Ledger was kinder, but they still talked with the older kids mostly.

These weren’t even friends that I got to see. They were more than just friends, they were so deeply embedded in me that they knew what I knew without any explanations. They knew the people I did, told the stories, remembered the same things. We clocked the walk to P.S. 82, the public school we all attended, all of us amazed that the walk was a short 7 blocks, not even a half-mile. The honeysuckle vine on the fence surrounding the schoolyard is gone, indeed most of the schoolyard is gone, replaced by an addition to the school. Chinofsky, my 5th grade teacher taught us to pull the stamens out of the base of the flower to taste the drop of sweet nectar inside, the first food I ever ate directly from nature.

The block is smaller and it has changed in 50 years. The landscaping is mostly gone from the little plots on either side of the front doors of 90-11 and 90-10, just patchy grass now and mostly fenced in. Rock Island, the backyard of my apartment building that once grew small trees and bushes, and a hill the size of a buried coffin that was perfect for dozens of games is now bulldozed flat into a parking lot for someone’s car. Painted, flat steel doors and flat concrete panels are slapped onto the entrance to my building, once tile and wrought iron and thick, wired glass. They may be safer and more secure, but it is as demeaning as a padlock on a antique armoire.

We are all different, too. Success and failure is far too simplistic a way to talk about it. We are adults now, many with children of our own. We’ve grown up, made choices, lived through them, come out the other side. We’ve had our moments, my friends and I. I don’t mean to slight my friends, but I will leave their private tales unspoken, and say only how much it meant to me to stand on these streets with them once again, knowing that my past was no dream and where I had come from was as deeply in them as it is in me.

Some of the older kids had brought a stickball bat and a Spauldeen [sic]. They pitched to each other, first setting off a car alarm with one errant shot then finally bouncing the ball in front of me and into the alley between 90-11 and 90-23 in a high, uncatchable arc. This time, instead of being able to climb over fence, it was lost behind a padlocked gate. I never cared for sports all that much when I was a boy, preferring books and bicycles, and the world that even then I could create on paper. So I was something of a stranger on my block even then. Now, strangers all, we get to stand one more time with the people in the place we knew before we knew any other. You can’t go home again. You don’t even want to, really. But you can touch that place inside you where home still lives and it is late afternoon and you are all there, running one more time in that soft and warm light, the world stretching out in front of you forever.