Back to Sunset Park ...

This is the steeple of St. Michael's Church. Like the park, the church was part of our lives for decades. From all three of us receiving First Holy Communion, to my wedding, Michael's Baptism and Communion, until the last time, my mother, Mary Fois' funeral mass and my niece, Laura singing Amazing Grace.

Sitting in the circle by the flag pole, watching the sun setting in the bay, the steeple rises like a beacon, showing us the way home.

From Sunset Park:

Seasons changed and changed again. Autumn leaves lined the long hills and pathways of Sunset Park. They blew in the wind and danced happily in the shifting currents, their golden, yellow bronze leaves spilling onto the narrow tree lined streets of the neighborhood.

Children rolled down the long slopes in the park, covering themselves with the colorful array of fallen leaves, breathing in the pungent scent, waiting for the long winter’s sleep.

Watch the next sunset

with someone you love.

fOIS

To understand the historic importance of the park for so many of us who grew up there and for many who still live there, read this blog and the others for the park. Three of my pictures of the park came from these dedicated bloggers. Take the tour and enjoy the pictures donated by the Brooklyn Public Library. It is for them I added the piece "So Long Frank Lloyd Wright."

I found it !

This is a review from Amazon and whoever wrote it, took the words from my head. Ah, yes. Universal thoughts do indeed keep the muse alive. And they had a copy:

I still have my copy of A Child's Book of Poems, my most beloved childhood book. I read from it to my son every night. This is the most beautifully illustrated anthology of poems by great poets, some famous and some not so well known (from William Blake to William Shakespeare) I have ever seen! I have so many of the poems memorized that I hardly have to look at the words, allowing me to soak up the fantastic artwork as I get lost in a wonderland of rhyme. It is a shame that this book is not still in print.

Mr. Nobody
Author: Unknown

I know a funny little man,

As quiet as a mouse,

Who does the mischief that is done

In everybody's house!

There's no one ever sees his face,

And yet we all agree

That every plate we break was cracked

By Mr. Nobody

`Tis he who always tears our books,

Who leaves the door ajar,

He pulls the buttons from our shirts,

And scatters pine afar;

That squeaking door will always squeak,

For, prithee, don't you see,

We leave the oiling to be done

By Mr. Nobody

The finger marked upon the door

By none of us are made;

We never leave the blind unclosed,

To let the curtains fade.

The ink we never spill; the boots

That lying round you.

See

Are not our boots they all belong

To Mr. Nobody.

Though they have long gone,

the images never fade.

Until tomorrow becomes

yesterday,

I remain.

fOIS

Grandma's Hands ...

Thoughts of those times and places and people we can no longer see. Those we never knew. All four of my grandparents died before I was born, so the mystique of grandma has always held a fascination for me. His was a sound, moving from the late seventies into the eighties. Revisited often by the R&B groups of today, a sound which can never be duplicated.

His deep mahogany voice, so often my only companion on a cold, lonely Saturday night. Here I am on a Saturday and I'm thinking of him, thinking of the ones who are gone, the one I never knew.

Grandma … the only one was my own mother and the touch of her hands wiping young tears, soothing night fears, remains … Grandma's Hands.

Her face greets me,
In my bathroom mirror
In the morning.
I am
fOIS

Traveling the rails ...

The desire to disappear to destinations unkown, to capture the child's dream. I bring a story from the Mid Hudson Valley in Dutchess County.

For this one glorious day, Betty Jean didn't feel her chest tighten or hear the sound of her heart beating in her head. The source of her fear would never find her in this holy place. Holier than the church or the place where the sisters slept, this was where she would come one day.

She loved to listen to Mr. Garfield and the many stories he told the children about working "the rails" as he called it. She longed to climb aboard one of the silver and black cars and go to faraway places. Once her mother took her in a bus to visit her aunt. Another time when her grandmother died her mother's brother took them by car to another town an hour from where they lived.

"I'm gonna leave as soon as I get to be eighteen. That's the age when they can't make you come back."

Chloe felt sad. She had no desire to leave the warmth of her mother's arms. She would miss the silver giggle of her grandmother and the soft mellow tones as the two women sat at canning time, singing the hymns from church.

They waited anxiously for the 4:20 from Albany, following the rails until they vanished around a bend in the river. Neither of them spoke. They didn't know it was the sounds of the wheels rolling over the rails that reached deep inside to capture their young imaginations and speak to them in dreams.

It was this magic that grappled their young minds and pushed them down the hills each time, long before the engine poked around the first bend of the journey heading out of Albany, heading into their station, and continuing to other towns and cities, connecting the map.

They watched as the first car made the turn down river, listened for the sounds of the engine, the long whine of the whistle, the burst of steam as it slowly pulled into the station. They loved to count the cars or the number of passengers getting off the train.

Often when they had the time, they went to another part of the river and waited for the long freight trains to pass over the high tressle bridge with its endless variety of boxcars.

Soon they saw the sun as it began to fall into the river and knew they had to leave or be late. Up the narrow hills, the walk home was longer.

In her dreams,

I am,

fOIS

Each night ...

Songs and images I have loved for so long, repeat in my head and find their way to these pages.

In memories I want to remember poems from the book I quoted earlier.

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Daffodils, William Wordsworth

We live for the pleasure of the muse
Captive of its magic spell
Within this place, I am
fOIS

So Long Frank Lloyd Wright ...

From Sunset Park:

The building, in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, was the last in a row of three houses, adjacent to the Greek Diner. These houses were cold flats where the current owners resisted installing radiators for heat or converting the old coal stoves to gas. The fronts of all three houses called “airy-ways,” were enclosed in ornate wrought iron fences. The windows looked out at a giant white factory across the street.

Across the trolley tracks, across the alley and reaching down three avenues, Bush Terminal Factory District spread like giant tentacles along the docks of downtown Brooklyn, creating jobs for thousands of blue-collar workers. The women sewing piecework in long lines on factory floors, heads bowed and backs bent. The men loading and unloading the countless ships from all over the globe arriving to the ports of New York, the longshoremen.


The docks and the Bush buildings remained for decades, abandoned like unwanted children, only to become the center of controversy. The center of a zoning battle to restrict the number of stories the developers can built up. The original plans would have blocked the beautiful vistas from Sunset Park and Owl's Head Park. The vista along the Narrows that stretches from downtown Brooklyn, adjacent to the Belt Parkway, under the Narrows Bridge and moving out to sea.

Progress wants more tall buildings to block the sun and ruin the landscape. Progresss hasn't done enough damage. It wants to see how much more it can exact from the land before it implodes.

Ironic. We thought we grew up in a slum. Now progress has found the small row houses on 39th Street and the areas of Lower Sunset Park near the waterfront and wants to install fast food chains and factory outlets for cheap shopping.

Someone out there still believes we can shop our way out of this mess.

It was the Brooklyn Garment Center, the hubb of activities, the inside of an intricate bee hive, alive and buzzing, producing sweet freedom for thousands of immigrants. It was for decades the gateway to middle-class. With its demise we witness the end of an era.

Looking back to understand
Where we are going,
I remain,
fOIS

Time It Was ...

There was a girl, an amalgam of any other group of little girls. Her image remains small and tender and untouched, locked in a treasure box, with buttons and bows and ribbons for her hair.

I see her looking back at me from a photograph, her face still soft and innocent.

Time cannot be measured between the last days of innocence and the insinuation of adulthood.

Nor can anyone explain or remember where the shortest moments of their life, their childhood, vanished, or when they ceased to believe in magic.

Over the rainbow
I am
fOIS