On!

My apartment renovation is done and I will soon be leaving my sublet in the Greenwood section of Brooklyn, or, as I like to call it on days like this, the Standing Water section of Brooklyn. The rain was falling so hard as I walked to work getting soaked from the thighs down to my socks that my downsloping street was nothing more than a fast-running creek.

This half-Hispanic, half-Polish neighborhood lies on the western edge of the Greenwood cemetery, which means we have a lot more funeral homes, florist shops, and memorial stores than most neighborhoods. I have taken the M train on purpose: Even now when it trundles into my station it surprises me that it still exists in the way that it’s surprising when one finds a shop that still blocks men’s hats or sells moustache wax.

Certain memories of this neighborhood will stay with me: As I walked along 7th Avenue on a sunny day a couple of weeks ago, where it runs along the edge of the cemetery, I wondered about the graves on the grassy hillside--there are geotechnical considerations. And soon I saw and answer: There was a group of four graves with their headstones leaning in different precarious directions and the casket-sized rectangles of grass before them swooped into the slope. They may have stood that way for years or looked like they were. Most likely they are slowly moving--even as you read this. The coffins below gave way and the earth above sagged into the empty space, the grass growing in the sun not at all disturbed.

Another memory: As I was walking by the Jurek Park Slope Funeral Home, on 4th Avenue, on a pleasant summer evening I could not take my eyes off a silver-and-black Cadillac hearse. It wasn’t of a style I recognized, but I guessed it was from the 1970s. My attention was riveted to the back window and its lace curtains, whose edges ludicrously and elegantly came together to leave a post-card-sized opening for anyone who would care to look through the glass. It was then that an attractive blonde woman wearing a short black skirt and black high heels and a rather stylish jacket came out of the funeral home, got into the hearse, and drove away. Life imitates cable television.

The Guerros Taqueria seems to have gone out of business, and I will miss them. Their tacos were delicious and they had about twelve kinds, ranging from al pastor to oreja.

I will not miss the mosquitoes. Probably one of the reasons why sublet was so cheap is that it does not have niceties such as screened windows. So, I have been spraying my entire body with Off! each night before I go to sleep. And for a couple of weeks the itching of fresh mosquito bites would wake me up at 4 a.m.--like clockwork. I finally read the Proustian paragraph in 3 point type on the back of the Off! bottle, with its explanations of how to apply the stuff to children, how to keep chiggers out of the cuffs of your pants, and other information I can’t use, and then I saw it: Off! only lasts for 2 hours. That’s probably on a hiker, for a sleeper in the Standing Water section of Brooklyn, it lasts till 4 a.m.--and man are those lady mosquitoes hungry by then. I am probably now nourishing the grandchildren of the long-dead mosquitoes who were eating me alive when I moved in.

Six or seven years ago, when West Nile virus was a new concern, trucks with nozzles emitting a fine mist of insecticide rolled through the streets of New York. Now there is nothing to be done--or is there? I would just like to add that I am very pro bat and pro dragon fly. Spraying a whole city with poison never held much appeal for me. I wish there was some way to release New York-native species of dragonflies instead. Or erect bat houses.