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Our daughter has been there 13 years, first in Manhattan and then here, across the river. She’s moved four times, if I remember right, and her struggles with lodging have been the usual ones.
In one of those places, as she finished her morning shower and stepped out of the bathroom, the ceiling fell behind her.
In another, there was a problem with the overhead light fixture, and when a friend climbed up to examine it, gas began escaping into the room from the pipe that, in an antique time, had served the ceiling gaslight.
Her present place, where she’s lived the last several years, is ideally located.
It’s in Williamsburg, on a tree-lined street, with a library next door, a grand Italian bakery a block away and a subway station just around the corner — convenient for getting to her work in the city.
At least along her street, the neighborhood is predominantly Italian, and it has a bit of the feel of an old-world village, with flower plots, little dooryard shrines and congenial, well-kept dogs.
The proprietor of the apartment building is more than a landlord. He’s also a friend — a lively, humorous man whom we’ve gotten to know on recent visits, and with whom we went to breakfast this last week.
In short, we’re pleased and much reassured by how our daughter is situated.
No doubt there are some who can contend with — or might even prefer — the eternal clamor and neon exuberance of Manhattan proper. But that’s not her nature, or ours.
One wakes here in the morning, not to sirens and rumbling trucks but to the chortling of pigeons and their wild cousins, mourning doves, perched on the iron railing just outside.
In the facing apartment, a mottled cat nudges aside the venetian blind and crouches on the sill, peering across at the cats looking back from our daughter’s side.
Outside windows on every floor are mounted little reels, from which lines are strung to windows in the opposite wing of the building — a kind of spider-web arrangement for the drying of laundry.
And in the courtyard below, someone has put up a striped hammock for sunning — on the chance that true spring ever comes.
To the left, at ground level in a grassy space extending to the next street, can be seen a mystery: what appears to be a pair of ladders, rooted in the earth and extending straight up 50 feet or maybe more, altogether purposeless, touching nothing but the sky.
That’s morning.
In the evening, there’s a little rush of young people coming from their work, glad to be home to the quiet. And women in head scarves, carrying plastic shopping bags. And old men outside the bakery, talking in the soft syllables from Napoli and Sorrento.
Let me tell you, if you ever have a daughter with a passion to try her talent in New York, send her to this block in Williamsburg to live.
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