The Childhood Street In Snow

That's a view from my friend Carol's front window on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, looking across the wide street onto Matthew's Place. I don't know the date, probably the late 1950s or early 1960s, but Carol mailed me the photo only recently, tucked inside a note written in that dear, familiar penmanship, evoking memories of snow days and childhood.

I've written about growing up in Brooklyn, and about that neighborhood in particular, including here, after my most recent return visit.

From my window a few buildings away from Carol's house I had a straight-on view of the red Pegasus of that Mobil gas station, which by the way, still stands, though in an updated incarnation. (I suppose there is some inherent cultural commentary in the fact that almost all of the odd little stores that once lined the street have long ago vanished while that corporate outlet for gasoline endures and seems to thrive.)

But new waves of immigrants have transformed the demographics of the neighborhood, and the businesses do reflect that...it might be easier to find kebab than pizza these days.

In fact, Coney Island Avenue is now known and celebrated for its ethnic diversity, and I like knowing that my family was part of its long saga.

But back to snow and childhood. Since I didn't post a Saturday poem yesterday (and let's face it, I am not very consistent about this) I want to at least offer up a passage from Annie Dillard's classic book, An American Childhood, which I talked about previously here.

Dillard grew up in Pittsburgh, so she knew winter, that's for sure, and she writes about a 1950 snowstorm and seeing a neighborhood girl, Jo Ann Sheehy, ice skating alone under the streetlight at night. The Sheehy family has previously exhibited ugly prejudice and ignorance, and young Annie is told not to have further dealings with them, but in this strange and beautiful moment, Jo Ann appears transfigured:

She was turning on ice skates inside the streetlight's yellow cone of light–illuminated and silent. She tilted and spun. She wore a short skirt, as if Edgerton Avenue's asphalt had been the ice of an Olympic arena. She wore mittens and a red knitted cap below which her black hair lifted when she turned. Under her skates the street's packed snow shone; it illumined her from below, the cold light striking her under her chin.I stood at the tall window, barely reaching the sill; the glass fogged before my face, so I had to keep moving or hold my breath. What was she doing out there? Was everything beautiful so bold? I expected a car to run over her at any moment: the open street was a fatal place, where I was forbidden to set foot.
Once the skater left the light. She winged into the blackness beyond the streetlight and sped down the street; only her white skates showed, and the white snow. She merged again under another streetlight, in the continuing silence, just at our corner stop sign where the trucks' brakes hissed. Inside that second cone of light she circled backward and leaning. Then she reversed herself into an abrupt half-turn– as if she had skated backward into herself, absorbed her own motion's impetus, and rebounded from it; she shot forward into the dark street and appeared again becalmed in the first streetlight's cone. I exhaled; I looked up. Distant over the street, the night sky was moonless and foreign, a frail, bottomless black, and the cold starts speckled it without moving.

So much magic, just beginning, quietly being.