Leaving Sesame Street

Sesame Street and I started the same year, 1969.  Though I was born a world away, in Boulder, Colorado, I drew closer to that enchanted Street in 1972 when my parents' divorce necessitated a move back east.  We landed in Greenwich, Connecticut to be near my mother's family.  My mother rented a little house, once the servants' quarters to a grand estate, which was where I began to make sense of the world.  I knew the couple behind us (Gary and Cheryl?) smoked something called grass. I learned you were supposed to tie a yellow ribbon around an oak tree if you missed someone, and that Smoking in the Boys Room was both naughty and cool (and that our teenage neighbor 's band had cracked the plaster of their basement walls from sonic impact).  I overheard that the president had done a very bad thing and had quit the job before he could fired.   And I understood that there were places you could only go if you were a member, or a cousin of a member, like the swimming pool.  I knew that we were different from neighboring families, in ways mostly defined by what we lacked (money, a father, a Betty Crocker ready-bake oven, etc.).  

But on TV I saw another world.  It was a friendly place with cheerful neighbors of various hues who greeted you and sang songs and told funny jokes.  Furry puppets could fly overhead or pop out of garbage cans at any given moment.   Fire hydrants spouted plumes of water for happy hot children to dance under, and in the evenings people and puppets alike hung out on stoops recounting all the fun that was had and thanking the Letter that had sponsored that episode.  There were no gates, no membership requirements, and no one was left out.

This utopia, which I understood existed in a place called New York City, battled in my imagination with the other New York City I knew.  In my other New York, my mother took the Ford station wagon into the city for a date, only to have the gasoline siphoned and our child seats stolen.  We kids were only allowed to make day trips (it was never explained what ominous things might happen at night), and it was always hot and stinky, and fire hydrants signified heat riots rather than a cheerful neighborhood cooling station.  New York City could swallow you up without anyone noticing or caring... My elderly babysitter lived in an impersonal apartment building, a housing project designed to stack the people who showed up in this city with nowhere else to go, a place where hooligans slide lit matches under her door for fun.  Frances died in her sleep and was not discovered for several days, an anonymous city ending to a life begun at the turn of an earlier century in a Swiss village where she had once been someone.

Years passed and I moved to New Hampshire and grew up; meanwhile, Guiliani and Clinton happened, and out of the wreckage of New York rose a new city.  Crime was down, real estate prices rising. The forgotten boroughs were getting hot, the Brooklyn my grandmother left in 1940 hottest among them.  Expecting our first baby, Jordy and I were living in Los Angeles but decided to stop over in Brooklyn en route to a wedding in Europe.  We never could have predicted the events that would lead us to move here -- eviction, an opportunity for Jordy to return to his previous career in finance, my brother-in-law's sudden death.  At the time I was just motivated by curiosity about this place of my ancestors, this phoenix of urban renewal.  

It was July, sweaty, sultry.  We walked the streets of Cobble Hill, finding neighbors chatting on their stoops, green markets sprouting local vegetables.  Hot kids found gleeful relief in the numerous and artful playground fountains.  We cooled off with lemonades at a community bookstore, and found a sidewalk Italian eatery for dinner.  At dusk we strolled the Promenade where the Manhattan skyline twinkled benevolently and we chatted with a friendly stranger about our pregnancy.  We capped it off with at the ice cream truck for a chocolate dipped cone.  We found ourselves, of course, on Sesame Street.

Two years later, when faced with a sudden move to the New York area, I wanted Brooklyn.  We found a house with a porch on a tree-lined street near the park.  On the playgrounds we found a mini U.N. negotiating world peace on the monkey bars.  On the summer solstice the strains of live bluegrass attracted us to the gates of Celebrate Brooklyn, an outdoor music concert. Disappointed we didn't have tickets, we inquired if any were left... Only to discover that tickets were not required (donation only!).  Overwhelmed with the joy of discovering this inclusive, creative place, we gave a hefty donation for the privilege of not having to.

We are not alone in seeking the Sesame Street utopia here in Brooklyn.  Whether refugees from suburban childhoods; West Coast transplants seeking more open minds and fellow creative spirits in the midst of New York's monied, old-world culture; Israelis exploring their Jewishness in a less polarized place than their home country; or natives who stick around because they dig their hometown, our friends and neighbors all seem to have heeded the same siren song (whether in English, Hebrew, Spanish, etc.)...  "Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?"

And we found it.  Kind of.  The other New York, we have learned the hard way, remains close despite falling crime statistics.  We've had our car tagged bumper-to-bumper in graffiti; we've had 3 break-ins to the car.  Our dry cleaner, an older Korean woman, was strangled to death with a wire in broad daylight by a thief who wanted her car.  A teenaged neighbor was witness to a friend's abduction by a con-artist pretending to be a plain-clothes cop on the subway.  And on a December morning in 2010, with baby strapped to my back and our two bigger boys in tow, I walked into the final act of a domestic tragedy that ended with the death of our neighbor.

Many people express ambivalence about a New York City that has become too wealthy, too squeaky clean, too Disney-fied.  I get the complaint and share the concern, even as we are probably part of the problem.  Part of the Sesame Street charm was that people hung out on their stoops and ran in fire hydrants; they didn't have central air in condos with doormen and rooftop pools to gate them off from each other.  Achieving just the right amount of grit -- poor enough to seek wealth in community rather than things, but wealthy enough to keep neighborhoods from falling to blight and crime -- is a quixotic quest that obsesses Brooklyn residents and generates a steady stream of material for the New York Times.

Whatever else we tell ourselves to explain our real estate choices, though, we seek neighborhoods that offer basic safety first, then a place to thrive.  At the simplest level, parenting is about keeping our kids alive and safe, an urgent instinct that comes roaring out of us at their birth.  So the question of the ages is, of course, what constitues safety?

There's a sweet irony to our own family's generational migrations in search of safe nesting grounds.   Like many Americans, we've added upward mobility to the search for safety.  Improvement upon the past, by definition, excludes returning to the place of your own upbringing, and so my grandparents, native New Yorkers, built their nest in suburban Long Island because they could afford to get out of the city.  Both my husband's and my parents, feeling their souls deprived by these hard-earned suburban upbringings, headed off to rural New England to raise their babies.   Where could Jordy and I go but full circle back to the city?  

New Yorkers defend that our city is as safe as any place else.  Murder, for example, happens everywhere; it's just more spread out in the country.  Which is true, and which is why I don't fear for our lives here.  I feel safer -- and I think our kids do too -- because I don't live in fear of other people, for whatever reasons they may seem "different" and despite our tougher experiences here.   (I am surprised time and again out-of-town visitors still express reservations about using the subway!)  We love the endless parade of colorful characters that this life offers.

But it's also true that where we grew up, you're much less likely to walk into a murder scene on the way to school.  City living means other peoples' trauma reverberates through you, like it or not, through the very walls of your house, and you've got to toughen up, even in this sheltered Brooklyn enclave, to cope with it and shield your kids appropriately.  It's exhausting work, on top of the energy required just to get the kids across the street, keep irrational toddlers safe on subway platforms, teach kids to ride bikes without training wheels amidst buses and bikers, or locate your kids on a populated playground where they can disappear from view in a moment's distraction...  This fatigue has helped us better understand our parents' choices.

So next week we are leaving Brooklyn for a year.  We haven't given up on Sesame Street; we just want to take a break.  The vision was more clear for family life in this city when our kids were still small enough to be restrained in a stroller and believed in talking Big Birds.  But these little bodies are not so little any more, and they don't want restraint.  Yet how to let them stretch their wings towards independence at this age, in this city, without a parental anxiety attack?  And as much as we love Brooklyn, we find ourselves increasingly over-stimulated; these days the buzz of the city amplifies the buzz within our household to create more noise than music.  Reeve recently summed it up, "I used to like Celebrate Brooklyn, but now I don't like it.  It's too many crowds."  We want all of this pulsing life, and want to give it to our boys, but we don't want to force feed it -- we want them to seek it when they are ready, and when we are ready to let them go find it on their own.  For the moment, we want to let them follow their bodies' impulses to climb, wade, build, run and holler to the wind without angering neighbors.

We haven't left yet, but just the prospect of leaving Brooklyn has made us fall in love with it again.  The fireworks after the Philharmonic in the park, all things Brooklyn Nets, 78th precinct youth baseball, the beach at Fire Island, the amazing musicians of Celebrate Brooklyn, Terrace BAGELS -- but above all, our friends.  Doctors by day, punk rockers by night.  Dancers who use their art to heal.  Chasidic wise women in the form of pre-school teachers.  Metaphysical plumbers.  Nanny confidantes.  Our friends here, of all ages, have something in common and uncommon in our worldly wanderings:  They are wonderfully weird and seem to invite each other to be more than they seem.   To quote Kermit The Frog, they are the lovers, the dreamers, and me, who sought Brooklyn for the open-ended place that it is and the place we want to make it.  So, despite the betting pool among our nervous friends who say we're never coming back, I'd put our money on our return, refreshed, hopefully with a winning concept for the sequel, Sesame Street 2: The Teenage Years.