Postcards from Bergen Street

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to live locally. "Local" and "sustainable" must be the most overused buzzwords in today's ongoing debate over finding a more ethical, meaningful way of life. Local especially has crossed over into gastronomical nomenclature, spawning the term "locavore" and numerous books on how best to reduce the amount of gasoline needed to grease each of our respective food chains. I've been thumbing through one of them, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which chronicles her family's one year quest to grow or purchase from people they know everything that they will eat for an entire year (yes, including winter). Kingsolver's sense of wonderment at the process of growing one's own food is contagious. I found myself marveling at the fact that you can put SEEDS that cost next to nothing into the ground and a few months later harvest FOOD that you would then EAT without having bought it at the grocery store! What could be more magical? What was considered one of the most natural and banal things in the world to most people of my grandparent's generation now seems like alchemy.

I would love to grow my own food. I would love to participate more in my own "gastroeconomy" (as Kingsolver and her husband Steven Hopp call it). BUT (big but here) I live in New York City, in a third floor apartment in Brooklyn. This is not the time or place for me to try to stage my own personal gastroeconomic coup-d'etat. And that fact has led me to think more creatively about what it means to live locally in one of the biggest cities in the world. I think "local" is about a lot more than food. It's about being a part of the community where you live. It's about the fabric and texture of this city of a thousand tiny neighborhoods that feel more like small towns to me than most of the dots on the map in Middle America that I've visited of late. "Sustainable" is about a lot more than green design and environmentally friendly cleaning products. It's about sustaining your neighborhood through your patronage of local small businesses. And it's also about loving the place where you live, being sustained by it in an intangible way. A friend who moved to Rome on a whim - knowing virtually no one there - once told me that, even though it was hard to live an ocean away from her family and most of her friends, and to learn a new language, and that she worried about being deported for her long-expired tourist visa, there was nothing like the fact that everyday she woke up with a feeling of excitement, like, "This is where I LIVE. I LOVE this city."

I feel like that at least twice every day, when I walk my dog through our beautiful, vibrant neighborhood in Brooklyn and invariably see something amazing or touching or bizarre. And after work when my subway car comes up for air and crosses the Manhattan bridge, if it's sunny outside I can see the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, Governor's Island, and all of lower Manhattan laid out in front of me in a sea of sparkling light. It really is the most magical thing on earth and it just makes me smile and sigh to myself, "This is the city where I live." So as seductive as the "back to the land" ideal of Kingsolver and other writers' interpretation of living locally might be, I think I'll figure out a way to do that here. Because I LOVE this city.

This feeling has been heightened lately because I'm relying more on the city for comfort and support than I ever have before. My husband Patrick just started graduate school at SUNY New Paltz, 90 miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson Valley, so for the next two years he will only be home every other weekend. As I adjust to him being absent during the week, I'm aware of just how much more precious the little interactions and vignettes of our neighborhood and my daily routine become. I want to record them as a journal of what's going on in our neighborhood so that Patrick doesn't miss out on all the little things.

So in the spirit of sustaining my own locality and being sustained by it, I've decided to start a digest of remarkable things that I witnessed, overheard, ate, or otherwise encountered in my neighborhood and the other bits of the city that I spend time in. Maybe these observations will seem entirely unremarkable to other people, but they make up the fabric of my experience here, give me a sense of place, and make me happy on a daily basis. So let me tell you about my day...