Queens Walking: II

The second in my series of walking meditations on various neighborhoods in Queens.

Jackson Heights

The intersection of 73rd Street and Broadway crackles like fire. I’m here, taking my first steps in a Queens neighborhood that isn’t my own. Tentative steps from the underground. Streams of passing people assure me that I have arrived at a destination, that I’m not just a wanderer.

I am bombarded with text: mismatched signs, fraying awnings, dizzying patterns pasted together in swatches. Storefronts teem with color — neon, pastel, primary — but they pale in comparison to the effervescent headscarves of the Muslim women striding past them. Gently shrouded in beautiful designs of pink and green, they glide underneath the morning winter sun with grace and ease. One block and I am submerged into this microcosm of an oceanic world only three subway stops from my apartment. I stand with open arms and my feet in the water, washed over with luminous hue. Jackson Heights swirls.

The smell inside the Mannan Halal Supermarket on 73rd Street does not register until I get past the wall of bulk spices. Gutted fish sit on ice in open coolers on the floor. The chopped head of some boarish creature stares blankly at me from under the glass meat counter. Carcasses overflowing. Frozen river pangash is only $2.99 a pound, much cheaper than my usual tilapia fare but requiring a certain bravery and gumption I do not possess. I breathe through my mouth, turn the corner and find a special on Domino’s sugar: 2 for $5.00.

The corporate neatness of the Duane Reade on the corner of 37th Avenue feels aggressive amongst the faded Dunkin Donuts and Middle Eastern bakeries. As the smell of street meat from a halal truck passes through me, a sweet brown-haired child ambles past, curls tumbling out of her puffy yellow hat. Her joyful image stays tied to that smell for me, the brown of her hair and the brown of the meat churning together in the filmic haze of memory.

Two more blocks and suddenly the headscarves disappear. I pass a GNC, a Foodtown grocery, the El Rico Tinto Bakery. I hit the first Starbucks at 79th Street. PS 69 looms pristine and stately, all fine brick and New England charm. The neighborhood begins to slip away from me, finds cracks in my clasped fingers and drips through like running water. And then: a turn north up 81st Street brings pronounced, palpable quiet. Condominiums and apartment buildings stretch endlessly, solid and impenetrable in their age and history. Front entrances are embellished with stained glass, lion statues, sumptuous circular driveways. Like a grandmother at her vanity table, these buildings make themselves up with grand gestures and white, pearled statements.

Across the street is The Learning Park. Almost to 35th Avenue, this tiny park squeezes a peculiar kind of whimsy in between brick walls. Enormous plastic flower petals of orange, green, yellow, blue; they stretch up from the bases of slides and monkey bars and meet the bare branches of the spare trees, all reaching towards the crisp sky in an arched yearning. A radiant secret hidden behind parked Chevy Suburbans. Suddenly, a young girl wheels her way into my consciousness on a pink plastic scooter. Her puffy winter coat shocks of magenta, and her unruly mane spills out of her bumblebee helmet, yellow and black and complete with spiraled antennae. Her father shuffles ahead of her, preoccupied and listless. She pauses in front of the park for a moment, right foot suspended in midair. “Daddy, this park!” she exclaims, a wistful delight seeping into the timbre of her voice. “Daddy, I miss this park.”