A VACATION IN BROOKLYN
Our twelve day visit to the New York area gave us time with our children and opened our eyes to their lives as young, independent adults.
On one of the afternoons last week, we hung out with our daughter in her apartment in Brooklyn. Her husband made us a cheese plate with crostini and a jalapeño jelly, and she offered to make us a cup of masala chai.
During my interactions with my children, I’ve been the eternal provider. I’ve always been the hostess, the hoverer, the mother who smothered. In Brooklyn, however, everything was different. My daughter was making me the cup of chai that I’d always made for her. She fished out her stainless steel saucepan and put water to boil. Then she poked around her kitchen for a piece of ginger that would work for three cups, checked with me on its size and then pointed out that I used too much ginger in my chai.
“But, Mom, do you peel the ginger?” she asked as she began washing the piece.
“I always do.” I said, remembering something that my mother-in-law had told me. “They say the skin is poisonous because ginger grows underground.”
“Yeah, I too prefer to peel the skin,” my daughter said as she went about peeling the one inch stick. When she peels a carrot or a potato she applies so much pressure that she peels off too much flesh. I wanted to warn her yet again that too much peeling removed nutrients but I bit my tongue. Parental lectures were landmines. I told myself that above all I wanted peace and fun on this trip.
While the tea was brewing, I returned to the living room. I sank into the inviting red sofa prettied up with indigo toss pillows. I tested the weighted blanket lying on the living room sofa—it’s therapy for anxiety and it mimics a hug—but as soon as I disappeared under it, I began feeling anxious that I couldn’t exactly to toss it aside and get up from under it the way I could with a throw.
A few minutes later I got up, as mothers always must, to check out my daughter’s growing book collection. I wondered whether she had read all the books on her shelves. I didn’t ask the question, however. I knew that back home in Saratoga, my bookshelf had more books than I would ever finish reading in this lifetime. The collection of anything was a journey, I felt, and I was thrilled she was engaged with books. That said, the rising pile of magazines on my daughter’s coffee table was a not a desirable stop on that journey.
I told my child that I needed to claim my book from her shelf—my copy of The Library Book by Susan Orlean with its bright red hardcover and golden lettering. She said she couldn’t return it just yet because she hadn’t yet finished it. I doubted it would make its way back to me; books often don’t and this one matched the color of her sofa and looked so charming on her shelf. I remembered that I too hadn’t finished her copy of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. It had traveled with me all the way to Singapore and back. I refrained from reminding her about it. A parent-child relationship is stronger when one of us forgets—or feigns a peculiar memory loss—or shuts up at the right time.
On this trip I would discover that forgetting was not the only thing a parent must do. We had to learn to trust our children’s instincts and judgement. Continuing to judge them from the vantage point of our past experience with them would be both unproductive and unfair. All told, watching our children in their space was both instructive and inspiring to us.
Life in New York is glamorous—in movies and on social media. Daily life in a metropolis of this size and density is not exactly pretty most of the time and my husband and I were watching their lives up close on this stay. We had flown out to New York in the first week of August and we had little to do on this trip other than to spend quality time with family and friends. We hadn’t seen our children in over eight months during the first onslaught of Covid in America and while the children had flown down to stay with us in California in November, we hadn’t seen them for many months while we were away in Singapore for the first half of this year. So much had happened in eighteen months.
Just before Covid, our daughter and son-in-law moved into a new pad on a tree-lined avenue in Brooklyn. The week we returned from Singapore, our son moved into a loft-style apartment in a gritty neighborhood that he said would remind me of his coop in Berkeley. While I was not dying to be reminded of that college experience, I decided that I would embrace loft-living during my short stay in Brooklyn. He had told me he had a great view of the city but when I entered his apartment, I saw that his window was no more than a porthole in a blocky brick building which had never been designed for the storage of humans. Still, we did have a grand view of the city’s skyline from the window when we were not seated on his sofa.
In contrast, our daughter and son-in-law’s apartment offered a similar view, it turned out, out of their right window even if I were seated on her red sofa. Their dormer-style windows looked onto a tree-lined avenue in a historic district with three-story row houses built in the late 19th century. The afternoon we hung out with them, I spotted the Chrysler Building, the famous Art Deco landmark on the East Side near Midtown Manhattan.
“But the view is so much better in winter,” my daughter remarked while standing by her stovetop in a diminutive kitchen stocked with a microwave, a toaster oven and a carbonator. “In summer the leaves block the view.”
The tea was taking its own time. It was taking so long I worried she had yet to pick the tea leaves and milk a cow. Her next question was reassuring, however. “Mom, how much sugar for both of you?” I thought she knew we didn’t take sugar with tea anymore. The aroma of Kolkata Chai Company’s masala chai began to sail into the living room. From my spot on the red sofa, I turned to catch sight of the tea on the stovetop. She had added milk and now it was steadily moving into a rolling boil. This would thicken the chai. It could make it bitter. I dashed into the kitchen to tell my daughter that the chai was ready even though she assured me it could use with a little more time. I turned off the stove and told her it was more than enough and decanted a cup for each of us.
I began sipping the steaming hot concoction made for me by my daughter in her little home. “Ah, it’s SO good,” I said, clutching my cup. I thought I caught a sense of relief washing all over my child’s face and body. I think children want to impress their parents about their newfound adult status just as parents want to impress and spoil their children with too much food, love, intrusion and repetition. My son harped on this last point during our recent trip.
“If you have something to say, try to say it once, Mom, and be done,” he said—and he repeated this three or four times, I might add—when he found me repeating a warning or an instruction. Apparently I did this a lot because my husband readily agreed with him. Now there’s another landmine in the world of marriage that’s related to how a parent views the other parent, thanks in part to the gratuitous observations of their sweet children. I told myself many times over that I was out to have a good time on this trip and sometimes I felt like the Buddha.
I could see that our son, too, was trying to make our life as pleasant and comfortable as he possibly could, despite the style of housing he had chosen. When our car rolled to a stop outside his warehouse, I was anxious. We rolled our suitcases into the freight elevator that he summoned. We loaded our suitcases and ourselves in, like sacks of rice and potatoes. Once a textile manufacturing facility, the hundred-year-old building he lived in was located in an industrial part of Brooklyn with some wild graffiti that I could not understand although I was reminded—by several young people I met on this trip—that I needed to cultivate an appreciation for the art form.
I’d seen forbidding elements like the freight elevator in Hollywood movies. Now I lived right by it. The loft apartment was part of a warehouse and the suburb in which he lived was once a seminal part of the industries that had built the wealth of New York and surrounding areas. It’s difficult to envision why a child who had once grown up in a tony part of the Bay Area would want to eke out an existence in one of the grittiest parts of New York, struggling with parking problems, squeezing his car into a minuscule space between two cars, daring to drive in one of the most aggressive metros in the world and learning to live in a place that seemed carved out for Al Pacino’s hit men. I had to remind myself, of course, that appearances were not everything. The week before I flew to New York, my friend had been attacked in a park not far away from us and the man had run away with her gold chain. Our son assured us that his neighborhood looked “a little sketch” but it was safe.
The day we arrived outside his apartment building, splinters of glass littered the curb outside his building in a specific spot for several days. The following day, I wondered why the broken glass still posed a danger on the curb. “Why won’t someone come here to get this all cleaned up?” I asked, recalling my Saratoga curb where garbage carts really were not expected to linger for more than a few hours after the Monday morning pickup.
“Who do you think will come to clean up?” my son retorted in an incredulous voice.
“Someone from the city?” I said. “Surely someone must have reported it?”
My son laughed sharply at the entitlement in my voice, no doubt. “I don’t know!” he said. “Who knows around here?” He walked on towards the car and cast a glance over his shoulder at me. “I guess it’ll get cleaned up—whenever it does.”
Five days later when we got out of the apartment to make our way to the subway station, my husband pointed out that the glass gravel was gone, at long last. The drama of the curb would play out for the next many days in many different ways. I never knew what I would find resting on it when we returned home at night.
One evening our son spotted a charming console table that would be useful in his apartment. We carted it in his freight elevator and found a perfect spot for it in his loft. The evening before I left for California, I spotted a cool floor lamp, yet another discard by someone living in the building. We were uncertain if it would light up at all. It did, thank goodness. That night, it began to light up a corner of our son’s apartment that could use some more light. We had got him several things to make his life easier but these finds were precious because they addressed a need in just the right way. Another day, our son noticed a cactus in a pot, a gift that had been abandoned by someone else. Before he could stake his claim and grab it, someone else carted it off into their apartment.
On one of the mornings, the door to the warehouse across from our son’s building opened up and an industrial 18-foot trailer roared out of it, blotting out the daylight as it tried to negotiate a left turn into the road. We realized how there were still mammoth warehouses in these parts. But the gentrification had begun. Our son’s loft, a residence for many young professionals, was an example of how this was playing out.
In an area called Domino Park in the suburb of Williamsburg, we learned about the evolution of the area from sugar refineries to grand waterfront public spaces where even dogs had access to their own water fountain. Some warehouses had now morphed into expensive apartment buildings with intimidating lobbies. In time, the grungier parts of Brooklyn, too, would likely become unrecognizable; the freight elevators may get a makeover; the warehouses would be glorified even as the buildings assumed a new owner and a new purpose.
As our son drove us to Newark airport, he made a stop in lower Manhattan to pick up carpets he had given for cleaning. They had become dirty from his move and he figured out that if he got them cleaned, they’d be as good as new. He stopped outside the carpet place in what obviously was not a parking spot; two minutes later, he was back with the rugs and we were off on our way.
I’d learned something about each of our children’s lives on this trip to New York. Every little hardship they underwent daily had taught them something about their own selves, about where they came from and where they wished to go. A long time ago, I’d never have imagined that a boy we had ferried to school and to classes in the Bay Area, would now be driving us over the Manhattan bridge and that we’d sit in his car, our hearts in our mouth, as he cut through traffic and zipped past scowling drivers.
Beautifully written Kalpana ! A proud moment indeed for you as parents to get a peek into the lives of your grown up kids.
Moms at the receiving end…knowing when to shut up…difficulty in restraining comments….all so familiar - strikes a chord Kalpana - enjoyed the little dramas topped with so much love😊