. . . Was easier than I thought it would be. So far, I'm not suffering any nostalgia, even though the first week was no picnic. It had odd parallels to my first week in Brooklyn, in fact. Then, I had no electricity for the first week (and how young and stupid was I to put up with that?), no furniture, no gas in the stove, just hot running water. Here, I spent the first week with no stove or refrigerator and workmen running in and out finishing up the painting and plastering. The new stove and fridge are great, but one of the knobs broke on the stove, so I only have three burners, just like my old one in Brooklyn, until I get a new set. That's almost funny: doomed to three burners.
Otherwise, the move went very smoothly, with minimal breakage: three bottles of booze and a cheap glass vase. The only really painful loss was my half-full bottle of Glenmorangie Port Wood Finish single malt. If there hadn't been glass shards everywhere, I'd have licked what was left off the other bottles. Last weekend, Kath & Lou and Missy shlepped up my daybed, which turned out to be enormous and really beautiful. On top of that, they helped me unpack and move boxes around so the place looks much less like a warehouse than it did. I'm down mostly to books (40 boxes) and decorative stuff, and a few odds and ends for the office and final closet that needs to be painted.
So far, the only two rooms that are more or less done are the kitchen and bathroom, and even the kitchen still needs drawer and cupboard pulls. I need to paint everywhere else, but I'm doing that bit by bit.
What I've been up to mostly, this weekend at least, is walking around the neighborhood, which is both similar to and very different from my old one. The weird thing about it is the Parkchester development itself, which feels almost like a college campus to me. I often dream about going back to Chatham when I'm feeling really insecure because that was such a safe and cozy place for me, and this feels a bit like it. Outside the actual development, it's a mix of smaller apartment houses, some of them very nice, some not so, and single family houses similarly mixed in quality. The streets around the development are a weird mix of new immigrant barrio, like Sunset Park, and ferociously kept up, established middle class housing; tiny cheap "boutiques" and chain stores; botanicas, independent pharmicies, and Duane Reade. Even the Chinese restaurants are a funny mix of greasy take-out and swankier sit-down. One cool thing I discovered in my wandering was a big new Chinese grocery store opening up just a couple blocks away. And I've found the all important drop-off laundry, just two blocks away and 15 cents a pound more expensive than my delivery man.
Because I had no stove or fridge for the first week, I ate out, mostly at the two diners on the two ovals: Ellie's just off Hugh Grant Circle and the Metro Oval Diner on the (obviously) Metropolitan Oval. I ate breakfast at Ellie's mostly, because they were huge and cheap and good, but the one night I ate dinner there I sat in the window watching the subway go by and feeling like I was in an Edward Hopper painting like Nighthawks, or something. Ellies still has one of those indented counters, like the old Chock Full o' Nuts diners used to, and it's always packed. On weekends, there are two counter waitrons: a beautiful young hispanic woman named Maria, and the "head" waiter, lightly flaming in his white turtleneck and barking out orders to the guys at the grill in diner lingo that I still don't understand. The only New York dinerese I've managed to pick up is "coffee regular" (that's with milk and sugar, to the rest of you). The Metro Oval Diner's a little swankier, as far as diners go, but it's got the shorting neon in the windows and you step down into it so you're looking up at people going by. All the waitresses call you "doll" and "sweetheart."
One slightly disconcerting fact: I've seen more cops in the last week than I saw in 17 years in Sunset Park. And when Lou and I were taking my empty boxes to the recycling center, one of them pulled up in front of us and apparently took pics, because the maintenance guy told me so this morning, when I mistakenly left a box in the incinerator room. Creepy. Helmsley management, I suspect. Ew. Not quite a gated community, but a little too observant for my taste. We'll see what other weirdness develops, if any.
Otherwise, I'm liking it here just fine. Brooklyn? That was then. This is now.
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