My friend Sam—one of the first people I met when I moved into my current apartment—took an early ride: me, on Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear and he, on the aluminum Trek road bike I fixed up for him. The breeze we felt as we crossed the bridge into City Island and at the end of the island itself would be the last relief we would feel before the sun would turn brick-lined streets— which we followed from Pelham Bay to Bronx Park—into ovens.
The bricks, faded, cracked and pockmarked like faces who have survived winter, poverty, betrayal and the births of those who have died along those streets, smoldered with their remains, and the last buds blown away from cherry blossoms, magnolias, crabapples and early spring flowers like tulips and hyacinths planted around those trees.
The too-early-for-the season heat, which reached 95F (35C), turned their shadows, all of them, into the pores, wrinkles and cracks in bricks and concrete slabs that will endure, perhaps, longer than the street—at least, as I have know it—will.
I walked down a street like it, not far from where I lived in Brooklyn on a day like this, which had followed and preceded another like it, at this time of year. It was near the end of my fifth grade year. 1969: The world was about to change because of events I would know about as they happened—Woodstock, the Apollo 11 moon landings and protests against the Vietnam War and racial prejudice—and ones I wouldn’t know about until later, like Stonewall.
But, even though summer had not officially begun, it seemed to have always been. The faded, flaked bricks and pinks, purples and yellows turning green felt suspended in the haze of that heat. Just as the world beyond it was changing, I somehow knew that what I was seeing and feeling that day wouldn’t be there forever. Nor would I. The heat was no longer only a meteorological phenomenon: I felt, in a way I couldn’t describe, that it was flaring within me. And within a year it would change me, as it would change my neighborhood.
(More to come.)
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