Books: June

Books bought: none.

Books read: none.

I had six pages left of Brooklyn Follies and I didn't finish it. Still, I recommend that book. It's a good, simple story set in Park Slope, nothing fancy, just story.



No good times
No bad times
No times at all
Just the New York Times
Sittin' on the window sill

I was going to wait until August to write my New York break-up tell-all, but another thing I've learned from Paul Simon is that there are exactly fifty ways to leave a lover, and I'm sure that among the unenumerated ways is by way of citation to a Paul Simon song.

So I'm leaving. Or at least thinking about it.

And then I remember: the rooftop at G's Park Slope apartment, the teenagers kissing on the 7 train, then rediscovering an interior life in an unlikely Flushing exterior, the bike rides to Coney Island and then out to Montauk, all the hours reading fiction on the train between Brooklyn and Queens, the baseball fields and dogs in E. Wiliamsburg, the walks across the bridge, the Mets games, the shows at BAM, the hundreds of runs around my park in the exact same loop, and then the first time I ran opposite, the weekends in Jersey, the post-Jersey contemplative walks on the Highline, all the ice cream, the lunches with M all summer long at the Seaport, the tattoo parlor in the back of the bodega in Bushwick, the times I thought I was in love, the times I realized how deeply I love my friends, the tassels of Whitman that tie us together, the Orthodox lady who asked us into her home to turn off the stove, the walks across the E. Village wearing matching white t-shirts like the unlikeliest Mormons, the moon, the tomatoes in the back yard, the storm inside me, the regrets buried in Central Park, the first time I realized that hope is a thing, the ice cream, all the ice cream, forever walking down my own Fifth Avenue, feeling the all the lives of all the people and stepping to the constant possibility of lives that are not mine but that one day could be, will be, wherever it is I choose it-- or if I let it choose me.