For those of you playing along at home, life stared us
in the face, screamed, “Plot twist!” and went all Joss Whedon on us.
A relatively quiet morning became an intriguing thing
when I was distracted from properly setting up a story. A philandering husband
and his wife have a life-altering fight in their kitchen (while the kids have a
heartbreaking conversation seated at the table and witnessing their parents’
marriage fall apart, and the dog is hiding under the very same table that saw
many family meals whence it begged and received delicious morsels from all
members of its pack).
I simultaneously heard and felt a truck go by. And this
began a fun internal dialogue.
Hmm,
that’s not a garbage truck.
Wrong
day for garbage, anyways.
Trucks
don’t go by here. Ever.
Well,
except after it snows. Ugh, I hate snow… I hope we have a mild winter this
year.
FIRETRUCK!
OMG!
There’s firemen on the block!!!
The rest, as they say, is history – or at least current
events – and involves a 20 X 20 X 20 massive sinkhole that brought more people
to the block than have ever been on this block on the 30 years we’ve lived
here!
And certainly, there is inherent drama in what is
happening. A writer friend suggested that I take pictures and notes because
there’s a story here. Many stories. A book!
She is right, of course. But this is Brooklyn. We don’t
operate the same way other places do.
And, for the Brooklynites, you know if Marty Markowitz were still been Borough President, he would have shown up with coffee and bagels, the Monsignor, a Rabbi, and the Imam from the local mosque and had press conference, a prayer circle, and a plan before noon!
For instance, a massive sinkhole that swallows a busy
intersection in a commercial thoroughfare, in Manhattan, would cause traffic to
be halted for blocks (for weeks!) barricades erected to protect the citizenry, possible evacuations, National
Guardsmen to watch over us, and train their weapons on the hellmouth waiting
for the Big Bad to show itself and wipe it from existence…
But this is Brooklyn. We suspended bus service for the
blink of an eye, and even slowed down train service in the morning so as to not disturb the kaiju that might stir in the guts of our
borough. After a thorough examination by the electric and gas utilities people,
Environmental Protection and other City bureaucrats, as well as visits by media
and tourists and lookie-loos who traveled here to see the thing on the first
day; the second day pretty much defines how resilient Brooklyn is.
Bus service is back on schedule. “Just drive around it!
Watch out for the gaping hole to the left…”
The first day every single neighbor was out, trying to
figure out what was happening. The second day, those who could, slept in. The kids played but no longer noticed the men in neon colored jackets.
Reminds me of this bit by Colin Quinn where he explains
why there are no ghost stories originating in Brooklyn. It’s because here, after
the rattling of chains and other blood curdling sounds, a Brooklynite would come out
of their place to confront the ghost.
“Hey, yo! You the one going ‘woo woo woo’ up and down the hallway? Stop that shit!”
We write our own stories here. And we don’t let the
world define them for us, either. I mean, your Good Night, Moon is our Go the F*ck to Sleep.
We once voted a dead guy into office because we didn’t
like the choices left by his demise. We've stared down hurricanes and tornadoes and
epic Nor’easters, given 'em all the finger, and gone right back to our bagel and
coffee.
Our roads may buckle under and be swallowed into nothingness,
but you can’t break us! Still, the stories that this episode will influence
ought to be interesting.
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