Ona Gritz

PASSAGE

…the children
we were
rock in the arms of the children
we have become
~Linda Pastan
from Dreams

It was my three year old son who showed me how to see the top of the Empire State Building from our living room window. I stood beside him, tilting my head so that my body formed a lowercase r. There it was, behind the squat familiar buildings on Hudson Street. The needle in its dome and the beginning edges of concrete.

Unique View of Manhattan Skyline, I could advertise if I wanted to sell our Hoboken apartment to very short people. But I love this town. Tree lined blocks of brownstones. Old factory buildings converted to artist lofts. Outdoor concerts on summer evenings. The wide main street where grocers and bank tellers fuss over my son, their accents comfortingly similar to the New Yorkese I worked so hard to lose when I left for college from Queens.

Set a novel here and the place would be just as much a character as the people. Sinatra's music pours from the open doors of bakeries in summer to prove its unrequited love for the prodigal son. Once a year, parishioners carry a statue of Anne, the patron saint of women and expectant mothers, while a marching band plays Yankee Doodle on fifes.

Hoboken has me with its quirks and coziness, but a big part of what keeps me here is our neighbor, Manhattan. My old love.

Studying the skyline with a child, what you notice is that the Empire State Building resembles a thin tiered cake with a single candle, that the Chrysler building wears tiaras, one on top of another. My son and I point these things out to each other whenever we walk the pier so that I no longer know which of us conjured the images first.

What I don't tell him is that this backdrop is where I lived through my twenties, the decade before him. That the river—gray and wrinkled—is a mocking reminder that it's time and age more than geography that separates me from that girl who wandered the winding streets of Greenwich Village, adding a trail of Patchouli to the already fragrant air.

Back then I listened to blues in dank, smoky underground clubs, not so much for the music as for the grownup feel of being there. I befriended street people for the philosophizing and reading lists they offered. And I fell in love constantly—with buskers, bookstore clerks, and with thick lyrical novels.

Now, on nights my son sleeps in his father's basement apartment, I return to the pier. The lit windows of the skyscrapers form constellations to make up for the starry sky the city robs from us. It's beautiful, bejeweled, but the darkness makes me think of that slim shouldered girl I used to be. How ready she was to give of herself, how lost in that dingy sprawl. I try to remember how I got here from that place, but the transition, like the river under the night sky, is inky. A passage emphatically crossed out.

If I look hard enough can I see the ghosted phrases, explain the choices I made? There is the fact of marrying a man who disliked the city; who, in truth, disliked much of what I loved. If I peer back further, I can make out the word fear and a feeling of being adrift. What I most wanted was to belong to someone, and for a while I did. Thankfully, before my relationship to the man who disliked the city ended, we created a child, so now someone belongs to me.

The rituals of mothering anchor me. Hot chocolate and thick socks on winter mornings, summer afternoons spent pushing swings and singing made up songs about the ice cream man. Rhythm creates a sense of safety. I didn't understand that in the days I floundered on Bleeker Street. To find out, I had to leave the waif I was behind.

Tonight I imagine she's still out there, searching and hopeful, unaware of how vulnerable she seems. Of course I'm the only one who can offer her refuge, take her with me to this side of the Hudson, to this place where I finally moored.

I'd put her to bed on the pullout couch in the living room where she could see the tip of the Empire State Building by holding her head just right, tell her she's welcome to slip back into her Queens-girl accent as though it's an old comfortable robe. Her robe is one of the few things I brought with me from that life. I find I have more use for it now, here, where I'm simply at home.

*This essay first appeared, in slightly different form, in Quiet Mountain Essays.