Places my Grandfather Built

I look back and a stout hawk is barreling over the golden ash trees, alone and white bellied. If you spend every day walking here, you’ll know the hawks: silent kings, constantly hunting, or being berated by flocks of smaller birds set on protecting their nests. Bird wings are shaped more like hands than arms. They have small thumb bones, and long fingers that make up the wings. Whenever I look at birds I admire their many shaped wings like the most delicate hands you can imagine.

This autumn shone. I work mostly from my room, weaving stories into the Zoom screen, or on my google docs, as I attempt to translate pedagogy to these seeming endless circumstances. I schedule my own time, so I find the small and unrushed walks outdoors quite spellbinding. And, in a way they have become essential to the day. In a way, each day is a different season. The park rises like a lazy beast to the north, the broadleaf trees constantly in new states of growing and releasing, and the familiar animals making their rounds. These things bring names to sections of the park: swan cove: full of shit and my favorite place, red grove: a path of maples that only becomes the red grove for a week in October, Swan hill: where they sometimes eat; turtle island; there is no other name for this. There, of course, is the reference to the unceded continent on which I stand, but this island is full of turtles, and rounded. So turtle island. Despite recently learning I am allergic to this or that pollen and suffer through allergies for nearly half the year, I am astounded at how beautiful this neighborhood can be with its uneven sidewalks, with its cats and rats, with the chandelier sunsets over the turf, at the soccer games in the morning and the day and the evening, and the skaters, and the runners. The squirrels and the kids, with its whistles, with its tomes of buildings, at how much life there is in Brooklyn. 

My grandfather was born about a mile away from where I live now. His father was a cantor at the synagogue and a plumber by trade. My grandfather was a plumber, like his father, and then an architect. 

The day before my grandfather died, I drank Evian from Florida where he had been living full-time for thirteen years: one last sip that had passed through security unnoticed. It tasted like Florida too, a smooth gel substance underneath: the swamp that escaped to New York. 

My grandpa always insisted that people were not meant to live in Florida. It’s a swamp, and should be left to the crocodiles and the ibises, to the giant hibiscus and ludicrous palms whose giant fronds grow into insanity, only to break off and rot on the ground. The swamp is quite sticky, and difficult to escape. 

Of course many people have lived on this land before. But not with crisscrossing four lane highways. Maybe I’ll take it one step further. Swamps, keep the people, but, maybe take away the highways. 

But I believe my grandfather found his ways to wander. He knew Brooklyn. He could close his eyes to describe the streets of the city, and he was eerily accurate, even after 30 years since his last visit. There it was, clear as day before him. I think he walked these streets many times in his imagination. 

Part of me thinks to myself, ‘he was 101, maybe I should have come to terms with his death earlier.’ But he wasn’t dying then. And when the wave of emotion arises despite myself. My childhood returns in a network of nodes linked by him, and it works its way out into my own identity, where I carry parts of him myself. He moved to Massachusetts when I was born from Long Island, and for, maybe 14 years, lived nearby, as my grandfather, and adopted, in effect, the role of a third parent. I would see him very often. I remember sleeping over in his small condo, in the guest room where everything had the hue, and, inexplicably, the scent, pale green. 

When I was between about 9 and 12, he let me watch Disney channel until my eyes hurt. I was literally the first time I truly understood getting to and surpassing screen time. Of course, no one had any idea at the time, how much we would adapt to the screen.

For most of my life, he lived in a condominium where there was a pool house in the center of the complex and a garden in the front that had a large rock that emerged from the large shrubs. When I was very young, I went to the garden to become a lion. I went to the pool to become myself. He really accepted me in all my phases. 

Even though all of the condominiums looked the same, he made friends with people there, and would describe their lives like rich worlds which bloomed from the uniform buildings that he expressed so much interest in. I remember, when I was in high school, he would ask me to cut his hair on his porch, with his tomato plants and baby avocado plants all around. He couldn’t eat an avocado without putting the seed in water. Maybe it was because he didn’t have a lot of hair at the time, but I was really touched by this. To be trusted in this way. 

But he had so much to tell me. I remember the amount of attention it took to listen to him. He told me about his family, about Judaism, about music, about Brooklyn and his life. He wanted me to know a great many things that he had learned in his life. The last time I saw him, he was sleeping. I sat beside his bed in the hospice with that Evian bottle next to me.

In many ways it is the job of an architect: to create spaces that are small nodes of meaning in culture: Places to be. The design of buildings tell us how to be in them, and so be in our lives, and with one another.

I don’t have many pictures of my grandfather, with my continual change in software and computers, I don’t have pictures of him, but my mom has a traveling shelf with all the pictures he took of my childhood, album after album. These pictures, as time has gone on, have acted like documents of that time, ways of understanding that time for me. Like small webs, these pictures wove my childhood together, and the first inklings of identity I created.

He would keep these bits of knowledge with him. When I think about what he gave to me, I think about it all like a web. He collected things and wove them together into tapestries in his mind. While it was not a physical home, he gave me a way of finding connections, familiarity in everything.