It’s windy and a bit chilly for this time of year. Still, it’s odd to have Fort Totten Park almost entirely to myself.
Don’t get me wrong: It was nice to contend with almost no traffic, even on the streets around LaGuardia Airport, on my way here. But it’s hard not to wonder, if only for a moment, whether I am cycling through a necropolis.
I don’t often remember my dreams. The few that I recall for longer than the morning-after might be closer to nightmares. Like this one: I was walking along a street like the one in the working-class Brooklyn neighborhood of my childhood. One difference: My neighborhood was flat, but on the street in my dream, a row of houses, all splintered shingles and bubbled bricks, skirted the edge of a bluff. There seemed to be nothing beyond it but flickerings of dusk.
Inside those houses, people—shadows, really—drifted by the windows—all of them opened, a little. I knew, somehow, that soon, none of those people would be in those houses. But I could not tell them. I could not tell anybody.
I had that dream many years ago—in effect, in another life. This is not the first time I’ve recalled it, though it makes sense that it would come back to me now—even if I can’t remember what I ate yesterday!
Don’t get me wrong: It was nice to contend with almost no traffic, even on the streets around LaGuardia Airport, on my way here. But it’s hard not to wonder, if only for a moment, whether I am cycling through a necropolis.
I don’t often remember my dreams. The few that I recall for longer than the morning-after might be closer to nightmares. Like this one: I was walking along a street like the one in the working-class Brooklyn neighborhood of my childhood. One difference: My neighborhood was flat, but on the street in my dream, a row of houses, all splintered shingles and bubbled bricks, skirted the edge of a bluff. There seemed to be nothing beyond it but flickerings of dusk.
Inside those houses, people—shadows, really—drifted by the windows—all of them opened, a little. I knew, somehow, that soon, none of those people would be in those houses. But I could not tell them. I could not tell anybody.
I had that dream many years ago—in effect, in another life. This is not the first time I’ve recalled it, though it makes sense that it would come back to me now—even if I can’t remember what I ate yesterday!
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