Je Thus tOning
Like the toning of monks, the sounds were primordially particular to a Brooklyn morning in March. Hearing a whistle brightening above tree canopies (trees grow here, you know), I reckoned myself a child yet again. I am seeing versions of myself entering 129 Pierrepont, but it was the sun in my eyes. To the Brooklyn Historical Society at 128, instead!
A lady… With designs toward poison. She, the replacement for exterior moldings, societal fanfare, irreversible, untoward, basking high above in wait. Those formerly admired, she said, but no longer as such, their faces are as high as the tree canopies, too. And yet this prepossessing maiden awaits indoors. She leans and looms, a gentle knowing smile, a list and a lilt. Magnanimous she is hanging over creaking wide wooden stairs, another quintessential Brooklyn reverberation, resounding while carrying stories up high and down low. Either direction, the sound catches on brass sconces, brass knobs, everything round and bulbous, reflective and discoid. It’s Brooklyn, you see, so stairwell school steps are wide and low.
Echoes keep carrying on down the hill to the water, as we steadfastly claim entryway over cobblestone. What memory is held here? How light or heavy to the touch of new feet, or even a new marble floor? How does the time-honored, foregone structure of acute abandonment somehow suddenly become bedfellows with the sleek and chic? Established…but not establishment. I longed for the spidered rotten docks, terrified and dangerously sharp, forgotten, blighted, diseased, I am sure someone must have said cursed. All of a sudden I missed it. How can it all change so fast? By the powers vested in the compressed, luring hinges of the bivalve.
Do we have this to thank, too, for what made Mr. Whitman so talented a subject of the sketch artist? What class of marine and freshwater mollusc was he? And where was the drawer for his scent, may I ask?
Thus, like a monk, I am toning. Still as the waters on the Bay of Dead Horses, or swift as Lanky Dan the Sugar Thief, I illuminate at the end of Pierrepont Street. I was there when ice broke the rock, and I watched as the waters pushed our land into recognizable islands. It was depicted in the film just as I remembered it.
All of which is to say, the adage is merely song: you CAN go home again. That Virginian was wrong.
