by Becky Wicks
The old man in the blue coat, who lives in a house in the middle of India Street smiled at me, just like he always did last Tuesday. As I smiled the usual smile in return and walked on by, it occurred to me that maybe it was the last time we’d exchange the familiar greeting we’d grown to enjoy over the past year. And I still didn’t even know his name.
The things you take for granted never seem so wonderful as they do in the moment you realize they’re gone. And the people who shape your every day existence never hold as much purpose as they do in those agonizing seconds during which you have to walk away. As I stand one year later on English soil, reflecting on the people whose lives were entwined with my own for so long, I understand that it wasn’t New York City that changed me. The city, with its bright lights and big promises may have made me pack those bags for the Big Apple, but it was Brooklyn that stole my heart.
I used to watch the tractors crawling past my window, setting the pace for the people who had settled here amongst the fields, factories and farmers in my small English town. I used to hate that everybody knew my name. I wanted opportunities and anonymity. I wanted to get lost in a crowd and find my own way through a concrete jungle, but most of all I wanted to be different. I suppose I really thought I was different. So imagine my delight to be given the chance to move to New York on my own – to live and breathe a different world entirely.
It was fun as well as frightening, but becoming a legal alien on the planet’s most unforgiving city is probably one of the hardest tests of human strength in the world! So much competition, so many people pushing you up, down, left, right, so many visa issues to sort out - how will I eat next week, how will I make any friends if I’m always working? Before too long I was missing the very thing I tried so hard to escape – the comforting confines of a community!
It was a welcome relief to find myself being drawn back “home”. Only this time, home was 4000 miles away from England in the comforting circle of people who also needed shelter from the maddening storm of Manhattan. Just across the river in North Brooklyn.
I started writing for Block Magazine. Through the stories I wrote, I mingled with so many local business people and grew to see life in New York through the eyes of others - locals, artists, people who wanted to be local artists but couldn’t afford it. I realized that Manhattan isn’t really everything. True, it oozes with life and lessons to learn, but not everybody’s dream is to make it big across the river. In fact, I quickly discovered most of the locals in North Brooklyn seem to hold a simple wish not to be forced away from their homes by developments for dreamers, like me.
Now I’m back in the UK and I will undoubtedly move to London, the eternal dream-chaser! But right here now, in the home-town I couldn’t wait to leave, I can understand why it’s all that matters to some that they can stay here.
I will miss you Williamsburg, more than Manhattan – those nights in Anytime, Spuyten Duyvil, Sea, far too many to mention. The bus drivers, the bartenders, the friends who made me cry with laughter and laugh at many times I may have cried. I’ll miss you Bedford Avenue, teeming with band members and heaving with style. And Bushwick for your factory living - even the crazy roommate who went insane! I’ll miss you Greenpoint, for your pretty houses, the Polish women with armfuls of groceries gossiping on the B43.
And every now and then I will think of the man I never met in the blue coat, smiling at me from his front step. I’ll wonder if he wonders where I am – that girl in his community he never really knew, but who will probably always remember him.
