We had the first snowfall of any significance in Brooklyn late last week. I spent most of the latter part of last week as well as this weekend holed up in my apartmen, under the weather and trying to wrap up a few long-term projects before heading back to the ancestral home in central Jersey for Christmas. Friday night, I left the apartment briefly to go pick up dinner from a takeout place a couple of blocks away. As I walked out of the restaurant, brown bag in hand, their radio began playing The Guess Who’s “These Eyes,” and I stepped onto an icy sidewalk flanked by snowdrifts, cars moving haltingly down Manhattan Avenue, pedestrians crossing gingerly as they went.
Since moving to Brooklyn, I generally feel a holiday behind: the lead-in to Thanksgiving convinces me that I should be ready for Halloween; the presence of Christmas decorations evokes a nostalgia for turkey and gravy. I don’t entirely know why; I have a few crackpot theories, some of them involving the lack of flora here relative to — say — the New Jersey suburbs, some of them involving a shift driving to public transit as my preferred means of transportation. But it was that strange hit of Sixties rock and the bracing cold and the undeniable quality of a New York winter that faced me as I stepped outside on that night that made it clear that I was, in fact, in the thick of it, holiday-wise.
Most of my family — at least the part of it that’s in the U.S. — is local. My parents, aunt, uncle and their respective families are all within a roughly four-hour radius; head further down the East Coast and still more of my family comes into view. When I was younger, there was an even larger familial presence in the New York metropolitan area, and that sequence of feelings the other night brought me back to something I’d nearly forgotten: annual holiday-season trips out to somewhere in Queens to visit my great-aunt and numerous members of my father’s father’s side of the family.
If I sound vague here, it’s not for lack of trying; thinking back on it now, it must have been well over twenty years since my parents and I last made the trip out there. I’m not sure where exactly in Queens the house in question was, and I don’t entirely remember who from the family was gathered there. The most vivid memories I have are of Queens itself — that first awareness that there were parts of New York that weren’t Manhattan, that weren’t museums or parks or avenues to stand and watch parades.
It’s possible I’m giving myself too much credit here. At that age, I had little sense of direction (it’s arguable that I have little sense of direction now) and I understood places mostly based on the length of the drive there rather than any specific geography. Eventually, there would be landmarks I’d come to recognize, but at that age — one in which I would spend most trips over an hour in length asleep in the back seat of the car — there wasn’t much I took with me. Parallel parking and oldies radio on the trip home; that feeling of cold as we’d step out of the car and the navigation of city sidewalks in winter. Two decades later, that’s what turns out to have endured. Strange.