The only therapist I could find in Astoria held her sessions in her apartment off Broadway. She was willing to discuss a sliding fee and had an open slot Wednesday evenings at 6pm. I am not a fan of therapy, especially if it is being “practiced” by social workers in ill-fitted pantsuits and pumps. I usually end up sitting on a couch that is more cat fur than fabric focusing my attention on a home-sewn quilt that continues to creep on to my shoulders. I can’t listen to what he or she is asking me because my eyes are busy searching the walls for a degree: Devry, University of Phoenix, Apex Tech? How is this better than a palm reading on Canal Street or calling Ms. Cleo (of the once renowned psychic hot line) in her jail cell? But with no healthcare I wasn’t getting any PhD. treatment.

I buzzed Karen’s apartment and walked up to the fourth floor, crossed the threshold of her door and introduced myself. She was barely up to my shoulder, she wore bifocals like my father once had worn while reading, a chain looping around her neck secured them to her, hair as long as Joan Baez and as dark, adorned head to toe in a black cloth dress, she looked to be in her late fifties.

The place was a railroad apartment. I didn’t know whether to lead or follow. There was nowhere to go but forward, I let Karen lead. To my left the walls were heaped with framed slogans and quotations – as if a crossword puzzle for self-esteem vomited on it and to my right mirrors replaced what would have been walls, top to bottom all the way to the sitting room: mirrors, mirrors, mirrors. Then the apartment sprung a wing housing a couch, a chair, a coffee table, more mirrors, and knick-knacks as if a vending license had been obtained to run a flea market out of this one particular corner of Karen’s home. Oh my god and the dust – now picture this doubled – due to the fun house like effect of the mirrors.

“Sooooo do you think that the mirrors make your apartment look bigger?” How could I not ask?

“Yes!” Karen replied. “That was the initial intention.”

“My Dad thinks that too. I never bought into the illusion. Just seems dogs and people hurt themselves.”

Karen then told me a story about someone she knew who walked into a full-length glass door due to how stupendously clean it was.

“I know plenty of people who have done that, porch screens too, I think it’s hilarious. My Dad thinks I have a sick sense of humor.”

“Do you like mirrors?” Karen inquired.

Wow and now we are totally off track, trailing off on to a tangent. I didn’t come here to discuss your mirrors.

“No. I don’t have any mirrors. I wouldn’t want to double the size of my life.”

I don’t take to therapy because of these types of banal conversations. “All About Mirrors, etc.” I spent a chunk of cash one year bitching about my cat.

“Why the hell does she trip me all the time?”

Sue, my therapist during this neurotic my-cat-wants-me-dead-series, would seemingly reserve judgment and say, “Well, who has the choice to get out of the way?”

I would belligerently reply, “Umm she has four legs, what do YOU think!”

One therapist told me not to sling my jacket over the back of my chair, “Hang it up!” he insisted.

“Why?”

He had no rationale as to what it mattered where my jacket went. I knew the answer. I was taller than him, he was bald, and gay – done and done. That session was over in 15 minutes rather than 50.

Another asked me if my parents thought I was a failure. I told him “yeah, of course they do.” He wanted to know how that made me feel. I said it made me feel like they were on to something.

A therapist on the Upper West Side stood during our sessions. I wanted to know why. He told me he had sciatica. I found it quite unnerving to have him lording over me each session and I could not stop myself from chanting “sciatica, sciatica, sciatica…” In a “Dog Day Afternoon” Al Pacino way – naturally we parted ways.

People, neither client nor provider, never leave their shit at the door, though that maybe the intention. And I never made it back to Broadway Karen and her room of reflections. I don’t need to double my fun and waste my funds.

My history with glass is plentiful. It is probably why I was first sent to therapy at the age of seven. I piled my carefully coveted dearly beloved glass menagerie into a multicolored Fisher Price train blew its horn and hurled it down our spiral staircase. When I saw the splintered dolls smashed on the tile floor below I was inconsolable. It was as if I had taken a pick ax to each of them.

In 7th grade I would open the window of my science classroom on the third floor and toss test tubes and textbooks down to the asphalt only when an audience was gathered to witness the incidents. By 10th grade my steel toes and me were knee deep in telephone booth glass. And my ears came alive with the sound of empty Absolut bottles meeting the porcelain of my sink.

French windows were destroyed by my field hockey stick or softball. I loved the sound of shattering glass. By my twenties the relief of ripping a medicine cabinet mirror from its hinges and watching it explode on the floor of my studio apartment was roar galore orgasmic! Busting wooden cabinets was never as cathartic as the fire works of flying glass. I can’t even tell you how many French Presses I’ve gone through, there is always an understudy beneath the kitchen sink.

My landlord in Chelsea used to give me tons of glass mugs – the kind cheap diners serve bitter coffee in – and told me “just smash them over the rug.” I wore goggles, used a hammer and bang, bang Maxwell did what I loved. I have history with glass.

I have been more proactive smashing it than sitting in a room surrounded by it and a stranger trying to get me to look at life in double. So I stopped seeing Karen. She called me to “calmly” discuss the situation. I could hear the buttons of her microwave being pushed while she told me I was “never going to get well.” She was probably irritated because she was doing the phone shoulder hold and had to be on her tiptoes to get the microwave to work. Ooooh and the kitchen is on the left so she could see all this reflected in the mirrors – bet she wanted to smash it, the image that is, instead she just continued yelling at me. Karen is a therapist, a social worker, not family, not a significant other – I don’t pay people, sliding fee or not, to yell at me. I dissolved the relationship permanently.

Everyone has their non-debilitating secrets. So my cat trips me, she doesn’t charge me and she lets me nurse Vermouth while I’m on the couch. We’ve taken a more Freudian path. Her ascot is pristine, her monocle is clean. We don’t use mirrors, but smoke is fine with me. She never interrupts and I never shut up. Things that happened in the past – well that’s where they stay, it’s progressive in a cognitive behavioral kinda way.

Abigail A. Frankfurt’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Minneapolis Observer, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, and on this website since 2000. She has read on NPR’s Savvy Traveler, and is currently a graduate student in English literature living in Astoria.

I still remember walking wide-eyed into Record Spectacular as a pre-teen with my mother. She had promised to buy me an album (remember those?) and I wisely chose the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. Ever tolerant, my Mom ignored the Andy Warhol zipper fly album cover but she did take a good long look around at the bongs, Bambu rolling paper, and black lights…as Emerson, Lake and Palmer blared over the sound system. She was not pleased.

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends…

Rock and roll was a significant feature of my youthful development and spurred me to become a rather precocious concert-goer…having seen bands like Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Queen, the Allman Brothers, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, and Black Sabbath all before I turned 16. I even snuck into the Garden to see the Stones in 1975. They played “Sympathy for the Devil” for the first time since Altamont and Clapton joined them to jam.

Back then, Central Park was the regular site for the Shaefer Music Festival. For a mere buck-fifty, a juvenile rocker like me could behold Bruce Springsteen or Peter Frampton in their formative pre-fame years. In August 1974, New York City did something unimaginable for those of us mired in the Guiliani/Bloomberg/Disney era. The city offered a free concert in Central Park featuring two of the supreme pothead bands of that era: Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airman and The New Riders of the Purple Sage. The drink and drugs were plentiful…and everyone shared. Longhaired girls went topless and a small cloud of cannabis vapor wafted over the proceedings like a soothing fog. My adolescent buddies and I felt like we were knock-knock-knockin’ on heaven’s door. One of my strongest non-sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll memories of that hazy afternoon involves protracted and raucous booing when WNEW-FM personality Allison “The Night Bird” Steele announced that Nelson Rockefeller had been named vice president. I didn’t completely comprehend then…I do now.

As I got older and rock concerts grew more expensive and less personal, I became a tad choosier with my music money. It wasn’t always easy deciding where and when to indulge. The Who at Shea Stadium: that was a mistake. U2 at the Meadowslands: worth the money and commute. They closed with a “40” sing-a-long that continued out into the parking lot and through the covered bridges you traversed to find your car. Another good decision was driving up with James “Q” Parravano to see Van Halen at New Haven. Like good little New Yorkers, we bought the cheapest available seats and proceeded to breeze past the Connecticut security…all the way down to the damn stage. I was a mere three feet from Eddie as he banged out the intro to “Mean Street” wearing that goofy grin of his.

All this rock and roll roaming eventually led me to make my own music. I sang and wrote lyrics for a band that included two members of Astoria royalty: Peter and Paul Vallone. Thanks to their supportive Mom, we practiced in the Vallone basement and cut a 4-track demo, but we never progressed beyond that. We never even named the band yet we did get invited to play a dance…but the deal fizzled. Pete and I differed over some of my lyrics. For obvious reasons, he didn’t like lines such as: “Our fathers show us paths that have proven/but into the past is where they are moving.” But I’m still convinced that at least one of our tunes, “Somewhere in Astoria,” was really something special. Go ahead and ask Pete, Jr. He’ll tell you.

Somewhere in Astoria…it can be found.

It was my ceaseless concert-going that led me to a new music-related avenue: band management. Guitarist John Carpente and I went to see White Lion at L’Amour’s in Brooklyn. The show rocked and we were mightily impressed, but on the way home, John casually mentioned he knew a guitarist who was better than Vito Bratta. I quickly mentioned a singer who could blow Mike Tramp off the stage. In short order, we hooked up Howie (with a voice to rival Freddie Mercury’s) and Anthony (Astoria’s guitar virtuoso)…and Cloak and Dagger was born. No record deals were signed, no giant concerts were played…but, as their manager, I experienced some rock and roll episodes I’d never trade. In the end, for me, watching Cloak and Dagger rock a jam-packed CBGB’s was Woodstock.

My ever-tolerant Mom grew to despise the sound of Mick Jagger’s voice but she did kinda like Cloak and Dagger…enough to differentiate between their version of “I’m the One” and Van Halen’s original. She once dragged my Dad and older sister to one of their gigs in Woodside. When I caught a glimpse of her enduring the ear-drum-threatening metal, I recalled what happened that afternoon after she bought me Sticky Fingers. We had lunch in a sit-down deli (the likes of which has been missing from Steinway St. for 20 years). As we dined, I couldn’t stop taking out my new album to admire it. Finally, Mom cracked.

“I wish you wouldn’t buy Rolling Stones’ albums,” she told me sternly. “All the money goes to drugs, you know.”

Mickey Z. is the author of the forthcoming novel, CPR for Dummies (Raw Dog Screaming Press), and can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

Dom’s wife (I never did get her name) was a different story. While she remained remarkably slim for a woman in her 50s, she was an extremely ugly woman by just about anyone’s standards. I’m no beauty snob and I’m not trying impose societal standards. This woman was just plain unattractive. The pounds of make-up she utilized to disguise this unsightliness only made it worse.

This odd couple always said hello to me but aside from the occasional comment about Dom’s silly truck or his wife’s looks, they remained relatively anonymous in my building and on my block…until one night.

My friends and I were standing around, as usual, when we heard Dom’s wife yelling at him in their bedroom. I paraphrase here but this is pretty damn close to her soliloquy: “I need a man! Make me feel like a woman, Dom! Don’t tell me you can’t! I am a sexual woman and I need man to fulfill my needs! I get all worked up and you can’t deliver! I should go out and find a real man to satisfy me!”

Lots of folks in my building also heard this tirade and, man, it instantly became legend. None of us could look at poor Dom the same way again. He’d shuffle out, stoop-shouldered, to his van and we’d snicker like idiots. We thought we had a right to judge the poor bastard…but things weren’t over for us with Dom’s wife.

Sitting on the stoop one night, I was talking serious sports with Hank and another friend, Chuck, who lived in my building. Dom’s kitchen window was directly to our right, light on, shades almost all the way down. Chuck, never as interested in sports as Hank and I, started to daze out with all our bullshit over RBI, ERA, and stuff like that. When he heard a clanging noise in Dom’s kitchen, Chuck squatted down and peeked in. His eyes grew wide and he called us over.

Dom’s wife was straightening up the kitchen in nothing but a long black t-shirt. It reached just past her navel and her pubic hair was exactly at our eye level. We sniggered like goddamned morons but I couldn’t help but notice her toned legs and firm butt. Dom’s wife kept herself in great shape and I found it very arousing that she walked around half-naked while doing chores. She wasn’t kidding when she told her husband she was a sexual woman.

Inevitably, Dom’s wife heard our juvenile laughing, froze in place, and yelled out for her beleaguered husband. It didn’t sound like: “Dom!” No, the sound dredged up from the depths of her soul sounded more like:

“Nnnnnnnnnnddddddddaaaaaaahhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnn!!!!”

We took off before “nnnDom” showed up (he had forever earned a new nickname among our crew). About an hour later, when I was coming home for the night, her kitchen shade was pulled all the way down but it was too late. I knew a little more about the mysteries that lurked beyond.

The lights first dimmed on Monday, July 17—smack dab in the middle of a classic NYC heat wave. Over the next few days, as Con Ed dangerously underestimated the number of people affected, my neighborhood of Astoria joined Long Island City, Sunnyside, and Woodside in blackout mode. Veteran New Yorkers know the drill: flashlights, candles, food rotting in the fridge, neighbors sitting on the stoop swapping “where were you when the lights went out?” tales. But this was more than just supply and demand. According to the New York Times, “the electrical network for the area of Queens where 100,000 people endured a lengthy blackout had the most failures of any of the 57 underground networks in New York City for the last two years.” Those failures numbered 71 in 2005 and 60 in 2004. By comparison, Manhattan’s Upper East Side experienced 40 failures last year.

It isn’t hard to imagine Bloomberg reacting with a little more fervor if zip code 10021 lost its juice. Astoria, on the other hand, was left literally and figuratively in the dark. Theories abounded but no one really knew what was going on or when it would end. Fire engine sirens sounded all through the night, darkened traffic lights made every intersection an adventure, and manhole covers popped like champagne corks, but most disturbing were the smoking and burning power lines. This I had never seen. The thick black cables strung from wooden pole to wooden pole smoldered, smoked, and burst into flames as frightened residents looked on. News outlets, lulled by Con Ed’s undercount, focused instead on those without power due to a storm in well-heeled Westchester.

The New York Times also explained that several failures in the network “involved components that were 30 to 60 years old … One cable, which failed six times last year, had a 67-year-old component.” This got me thinking about Astoria’s sudden influx of yuppies. Starbuck’s, one-bedroom apartments going for $1500 a month, yoga classes, a community garden—my humble neighborhood is officially hip. So hip that my wife, Michele, wants me to get a t-shirt made up that reads: “Born in Astoria” so no one mistakes my shaved head as a feeble attempt at modish credentials. But I digress.

Astoria’s gentrification has resulted in the tearing down of houses to be replaced by small apartment buildings. Thus, a slice of real estate that may have once housed an aging widow is now home for a dozen or so of the upwardly mobile…each with two air conditioners, two computers, two televisions, and a microwave oven. It doesn’t require genius to imagine this trend impact a 67-year-old component. But then again, no one has ever mistaken power companies or politicians for Chomsky or Einstein.

Power has, for the most part, been restored in Astoria and the surrounding areas. Small businesses are desperately trying to recoup losses and, as they say, life is returning to “normal.” But if normal means we continue trusting those in power to do the right thing, maybe we need a new normal. If it means overusing electricity (which is generated by the burning of fossil fuels), taking for granted that lights will go on when we hit a switch, or maintaining our awed trust in technology, I’d say “normal” may be the real problem. If the Queens blackout can help us discover a more enlightened perspective, Con Ed and Mayor Bloomberg just may have done us a favor.

The note seemed to be directed at the building across the street, but looking up it was impossible to tell which window the writer might have meant to address. The message looked fresh, so the train-ride in question probably took place this evening, but other than that there was nothing to identify the messenger or the recipient.

While I filled up the washing machine I considered the writer. Was it a man or a woman? It seemed like something a love struck young man might do, but it could just have easily been a young woman. Whoever it was, they must have had chalk on them. Perhaps they were a teacher.

I pictured an idealistic young man wearing an old-fashioned corduroy jacket with patches on the sleeves. It was his third date with the girl from the admissions office, and he had invited her to go to dinner and a movie. They saw “Lost in Translation,” and he felt only a little disingenuous when he declined to tell her that he had already seen it. It was the perfect date movie, he reasoned, and why take a risk with the new “Matrix.”

They ate dinner at a Cuban restaurant and joked about their coworkers. At one point she was laughing and reached over to squeeze his hand, which he interpreted as a good sign. After the movie, though, he ran out of ideas. It was Sunday night, and she needed to be up early for school, so they agreed to call it a night. On the subway ride home he measured his options and kissed her and was pleasantly surprised when she pulled him closer. They were silent as they walked down the dark block to her apartment while they tried to work their way through the pull of intimacy and its complications.

She invited him upstairs but for some reason he said no, he’d better get home, and they should move slowly and savor this. She smiled with relief, and he congratulated himself internally on his knack for reading her mood. They kissed with a passion that might have been a little forced, but which felt right.

After she left he lingered downstairs and watched for her apartment light to come on. When it did, he imagined her putting her bag away and folding her coat and suddenly he wanted to yell up to her how happy he was but instead he pushed his hand into his coat pocket and worried a piece of chalk that he always kept there.

This seemed like a pretty good explanation, but something was missing. The message seemed too direct for a third date.

Picture instead a couple, say two young women. They have been dating for several years. They met at a party for a mutual friend who was celebrating his first gallery opening. They were both intolerably bored, and they gravitated towards one another. After chatting a bit they left to get a drink next door, where they laughed at the pretensions of artists. One of them was herself an artist, although she was loath to call herself one. She made things out of whatever was at hand. She sewed sweaters with ironic logos, tea cozys embroidered with lines from Revelations embroidered, magnets out of melted marbles, that sort of thing.

Their fights involved moving in with one another. The woman in the apartment down the block wanted the artist to come live with her. It had been five years, after all, and she was tired of splitting their time between the apartment in Astoria and the other’s loft in a seedy section of Brooklyn. But the artist didn’t want to give up her independence, and what started as a small, bantering argument soon blew up into a fight where all of their unsaid frustrations were aired. “I’m tired of this,” the artist said. “I’m tired of living like a business woman. I’m tired of waking up every morning and getting our coffee and getting on the fucking train and going to our fucking jobs. Don’t you see what we’re becoming?” The woman who lived down the block was silent after this last outburst. That was her favorite part.

The artist left the apartment and went down to the street. She wanted to go back in but she was stubborn, and she felt like she had gone too far to change course. When she wrote the message on the sidewalk it wasn’t clear to her if it was an olive branch or a goodbye, but at home alone that night she knew.

I got some change and put the laundry in the dryer and watched some Spanish TV and then went out for a cigarette. Down the street three young women on their way home from the city stopped to read the message. They discussed it as they passed me.

“That’s creepy,” one of them said.

“Sounds like a bad date,” said the second.

“Or maybe a stalker. Can you imagine that? What if he rides the train home with her and tonight he decided to follow her home?”

I wanted to interrupt and say, “Why would the stalker carry chalk?” but I realized that they had a point, and they were looking at me suspiciously as it was.

I took the laundry out of the machine and walked home past the message and looked up at the windows above and tried to picture the person up there for whom it was intended. I’d like to think whoever the message was for appreciated it. Maybe they will be drinking coffee tomorrow morning and they will look out the window and spot the message and laugh out loud. Or maybe the message will tell them that it is over. Or perhaps the women were right, and someone will look out the window and feel a chill, and picture the faces on the train. Didn’t one of them look familiar?

Whatever it is, the message is there, tonight, waiting for someone who knows what it means to come along and decipher it.

204 Center attracted a colorful array of characters. I lived within two blocks of “the projects,” so the games were pretty ethnically mixed and often fascinating. There was one Latin guy who never came to play, just to hang with his crew. He showed me the machete he always carried with him in case of trouble. He kept down the leg of his pants and would spend all night walking with a funny limp.

I remember one night—after smoking far too much herb—we got into a half-court game with some guys from the projects. Things were confusing and seemed to be moving slower than usual, but my outside shot was on…and I found myself getting noticed by the older guys. I can still feel the pride I felt when they complimented me.

We haven’t come far from our tribal roots.

Later that night, I walked past some black girls who were sitting on the sidelines. They were all about 18. One smiled at me and said: “What’s happening?”

She was slim and very pretty: a little girl face with a woman’s body and attitude. I did not know how to react to her, so I just smiled and started to make my way across the gym. To my surprise, she called me over for a lesson.

“When someone says ‘what’s happening’ to you, you either say ‘nothing’ or ‘me,’ okay?”

I smiled and said, “Yeah.” A cool 18-year-old black girl had taken the time to school my 14-year-old white ass and I was real pleased with myself.

There was one black guy, a few years older than me, who ruled 204 Center. I recall his name as Mickey Sessums. He didn’t come to the center too often but when he did, we all stopped to watch. Another guy who peaked at a young age, Mickey was far and away the best player in 204 and this notoriety did not escape the girls who came inside to stay warm and meet boys.

Mickey made a move on a white girl in my class. Her name was Annie and she made little or impression on any of us. You didn’t even know Annie was there…she wasn’t particularly attractive in that eighth grade sense. But she stunned us by hanging with Mickey at 204 and eventually becoming his girl. Being 14-year-old provincial dopes, we called her “Annie Black Cock,” but only behind her back. None of us wanted Mickey coming after us for messing with her.

I’ll tell you what: I sure looked at Annie in a different light after that. I suddenly felt like a 14-year-old provincial dope…while she was a sophisticated woman of the world. When I would run into her on Mickey’s arm, he’d nod and she’d just smile at me like I was a silly little boy…which, of course, I was.

The last time I had been to Socrates was at night in late August. I sat on an old bed sheet with my fiancée Anna, her brother Abe, and his scrappy Jack Russell Julius. We were surrounded by other families from the neighborhood, also on blankets, as we watched Kid ’N Play’s “House Party,” part of a free outdoor screening series. That was the week before Abe moved out to L.A. with his wife, Lynn. Now, it was October and windy and cold. I walked by Crescent Street, their block and their building and a yellow sign advertised that their two-bedroom was for sale. They were the reason Anna and I had moved from the Upper East Side to Astoria a year ago, and now they had moved to the West Coast so Lynn could give acting all she had.

I pressed on along Broadway, down past a shopping center parking lot and the post office with its long lines of frustrated customers. Pavement sprinkled with glass shards encircled the trees that lined the avenue. Crossing 21st Street, I saw the banner for the Bel Aire Diner, which read: #1 DINER IN ASTORIA. That was where Abe and Lynn had gone with us for our first dinner in Queens after our move. Considering how many diners there were out here, the banner made a strong claim, but as far as we were concerned, it was true.

Further down Broadway, I passed Long Island City High School, with its kempt soccer field and its view of the Manhattan skyline. Latino guys stood in front of the school in black down jackets while Latina girls played soccer on the field. One girl with a ponytail tripped and fell, and I realized that it wasn’t grass at all but AstroTurf.

Down past auto shops and taxi stands and a junkyard, beneath whose tall green gate an attack dog snarled and burrowed its jagged teeth.

Past debris strewn about the cracked pavement: broken umbrellas, leaves, used condoms, and plastic bags.

Finally, I crossed Vernon Boulevard and arrived at Socrates.

Half a dozen men and women pushed rakes and wheelbarrows across the grassy field, cleaning up any visible garbage. The ground was soaked from Hurricane Wilma, which had pushed through New York only the day before. Scattered all over the park were clusters of perforated green poles with street signs attached. Were they transplanted by the storm or just the new sculpture exhibit? Some signs had names like Ludlow, Essex, or Grand Streets. Others had addresses from variously numbered streets. I couldn’t tell if each cluster symbolized a different part of Manhattan, but the flags made a striking installation. Bolted to the base of each pole were incomplete bikes. Some with just seats, some with only handlebars or chains, all the bikes had rusty frames. A few even had wheels bent at 90-degree angles.

Aside from the bike display, there was a circle of six wooden poles that were supposed to be bare tree bird feeders, but I didn’t see how. At the other end of the field, near the rocks that led down to the East River, stood two large cutouts of what I assumed were Disney figures since they were painted yellow. I thought I saw the sillhouette of the Magic Kingdom as I walked between the two sculptures, towering over me and saluting one another.

From that corner, Socrates held a stunning view of the drifting water and the northern half of Roosevelt Island, which a little abandoned lighthouse punctuated at its tip. Anna once said that the dull brick buildings made Roosevelt Island look straight out of Fahrenheit 451. Straight across the river, I could see the tops of the hi-rise buildings that lined the East River promenade. I stood at the same latitude as 83rd Street and could see The Brearley School across the river, where I have taught elementary school girls for the past two years. A running joke with Abe and Lynn had been that when my kids had a question during a lesson at Brearley, I could tell them to look out the window. There they’d be able to see Abe and Lynn standing where I now stood on Socrates’ field, holding up the answer on a huge sign.

The gorgeous view which once made me feel at peace now left me chilled and lonely. I called Abe and Lynn out in L.A. I’d forgotten about the time difference until their home phone was ringing. It was only a quarter past 9, but Lynn was awake.

“I’m taking a walk through Socrates,” I said. “There’s a great new exhibit with bikes locked to street poles.”

“Cool,” she said, then laughed, “Thanks for faxing Aben’s glasses prescription out here yesterday.” Anna and I had been picking up the last scraps of Abe and Lynn’s mail at their old place. For some reason, the prescription I’d faxed from my office had his named as “Aben.”

“How have you guys been?” Lynn asked.

“Busy,” I said, “between the wedding plans, work, and grad school. But things are going well. We miss you guys a lot.” I walked over to my favorite exhibit at Socrates—which just happened to be the only permanent display—a huge wind chime that sat on six silver poles between the river’s edge and the wooded part of the park.

Lynn said, “We miss you guys, too.” In the background, Julius let out a little bark, which he rarely did when they had lived in Astoria. “We don’t have anyone that close to us out here.”

The wind chime looked like a series of spinning barbells. There were two twirling silver bowls on either end of each metal bar, hard at work from the wind that ripped up the river. The chime gave off dull notes that sounded like they should have been coming from the lighthouse.

“Hey, did Abe tell you I got the part?”

“No, but Anna told me. Congratulations!” I had heard the news yesterday from Anna, who heard it from Abe. Lynn landed three lines in a TV show called “Numb3rs.” It wasn’t a particularly good show or a good role, but it had been her first audition out there. To them, it was confirmation that their move was worthwhile.

“Thanks, I think we’re going to have to celebrate. It’s gorgeous here today.”

“Well, have a great time,” I said, zipping up my jacket. We said goodbye and I walked through the patch of woods, past another cluster of bike flags. A large mutt that looked to be part German shepherd ran past with a tennis ball in its mouth. It was Biscuit, a dog I knew from when Julius used to run around Socrates. Biscuit’s owner followed her along the path. She was a short woman with curly brown hair and a permanent smile, whom I’d talked to a few times, mostly about her dog and Julius. Now that Julius wasn’t there, she passed me by and didn’t say hello.

Another group would head for the slides. There was always one student who would climb to the top, then stay there, causing a traffic jamb below. Eventually the ones behind him would shove him down. The perpetrator would get back on the slide and do his non-moving act again. If I caught him, I’d banish him from the slides. But there was always a risk he’d do his version of a sit-down strike, and not come with the class when it was time to go. Sometimes, it was easier to grab his legs and help the others push him down the slide. I wasn’t taught how to do that in graduate school, but when the tough – my students – don’t get going, intervention is required to get them going again.

Then there was always one overweight student who would sit on the seesaw and yell for someone to join him. It was usually the tiniest kid who would take up his offer. They’d sit there for the whole period, wondering why they couldn’t get the seesaw to move. I’d push down the side the tiny student was on and explain the principles of weight distribution, but they’d never listen, preferring to be left in a wondering state.

A few would run to the sandbox, only to discover there was no sand. That wouldn’t stop them. They’d mimic playing in the sand. But there’s a limit to mimicking. After a while it stops being fun. Their solution was to go to the school’s garden and import dirt. But dirt is different from sand. It may contain rocks. Being a teacher makes you an expert at spotting possible weapons. It’s easier to remove the students than the weapons, so I’d banish them from the sandboxes.

The rest of the students were at the monkey bars. Instead of climbing them, they were used to play their favorite game – “Jail.” It consists of placing certain students inside the bars and trying to prevent them from escaping. I don’t know the derivation of the game, but with most of them having one parent or relative in jail, it became meaningful. The only problem was that the same students would always be the wardens and prisoners. I tried to change that, but once they took on a role, they wouldn’t swap.

I was glad when the whistle blew, and playground time was over. If only the equipment at the playground was used properly, it wouldn’t have been so difficult. But my students used them for their own purposes. That took some creativity, which was what I was trying to teach. I didn’t want to squash that.

After four years in Boston and one in Dublin, I was lured to Carroll Gardens by two high school friends. We grew up on Staten Island and I was resistant to returning to New York as an outer-borough girl. They only convinced me to sign the lease by pointing out that I could take a cab home from Manhattan every night and still not spend as much money as I would for a Manhattan apartment. We took a three bedroom for $1100—$367 each!—and I managed okay.

There was no “restaurant row” in Carroll Gardens back then—it was 1994; you avoided Smith Street if you valued the contents of your wallet. There were no funky shops, and there was only one bar in the area worth going to. For years, my roommates and I would walk twenty minutes in all seasons to the Brooklyn Inn just to mingle with other young, creative types and stock the jukebox with songs by the Beatles, the Jayhawks, and the Replacements. I discovered “my” Brooklyn there and I loved it.

Years passed, and then slowly, surely, came signs. My brother—a fierce Manhattanite—suggested we do brunch in Brooklyn for a change. My college friends started moving across the bridge. Patois opened on Smith Street, “718” t-shirts appeared, and you could suddenly buy handmade handbags and vintage furniture on Smith Street. Carroll Gardens had arrived!

Mr. Right, alas, had not, and I started Internet dating. I was looking for someone funny and kind, of course, but my ad might as well have also said, “Must love Brooklyn.” Seriously. Phineas was fun and all . . . but he lived in the East Village. Don was a great kisser, but who could stand the commute to the Upper West Side?

And then I met Nick the old-fashioned way. And he lived in Astoria.

Queens!

Only the worst possible place to live maybe ever!

And he loved it! He’d been living in Astoria and Long Island City for the ten years I’d been living in Brooklyn. He’d never even been to Carroll Gardens! And yet it was obvious. He was the one.

We favored Brooklyn during the early days. We went to Coney Island on our first date; went back to Carroll Gardens and ate pizza on the roof of my building, overlooking the Manhattan skyline. We went out for expensive meals on Smith St., made foolish declarations about the future while smoking outside The Bar. I was having my Brooklyn romance at last!

We were also spending time in Queens—it was only fair, I knew—and I mostly hated it. It just wasn’t as cute! There weren’t as many “cool” places. I liked the Beer Garden, sure. I loved the now defunct Tupelo–no doubt one of the coolest bars there ever was. I adored the food: Indian, Istrian, Egyptian, otherwordly tacos from the back counter of the St. James Deli. My taste buds came alive. But I also got on the wrong train a few times, ended up in parts of Queens I’d rather not see on foot again. I hated the dollar and discount stores, the bars with bad jukeboxes and too many TVs, the cafes that seem to require their customers have EU passports.

Nick had been looking to buy a place before I met him. Now he widened his search to include Carroll Gardens, which he’d come to know and love, and also to include me. A quick look at the Times Real Estate section was enough to confirm that he (we) couldn’t buy in Carroll Gardens; we simply couldn’t justify spending so much money on so little space. We weren’t that kind of people. At least, Nick wasn’t. Me, I wasn’t so sure about. I had recently sold a novel and was fantasizing about movie deals and brownstones. In reality, though, I could not argue with the numbers. Prices had skyrocketed since I moved into that first apartment and all I could do was berate myself for not having had the foresight to beg, borrow, or steal to buy something back in ‘94.

So I tagged along when Nick looked at houses in Astoria. One was pink stucco with an above-ground pool. Another looked like it was about to collapse in on itself. And then we found it. The one. A two-story row-house on a quiet block, a short walk from subway. I seriously must have been in a fugue state when I said, “You should make an offer,” because I don’t really remember saying it or why I would have, except that maybe a part of me knew it was time for me to move on.

The offer was accepted, and then Nick made another kind of offer that I accepted. He had the good sense to pop the question in Brooklyn—on Coney’s Wonder Wheel—and we toasted our engagement in the shadow of the Great Bridge at the River Café. Only then did I realize fully what was happening: I was engaged to be married; I would be moving to Queens. I did what anyone would have done in the situation. I cried. I insisted we have the wedding in Brooklyn. I made him promise me we’d go out in Carroll Gardens twice a month every month so long as we both shall live.

And then I moved in. And we had our first barbecue. And we started scraping the wallpaper off the walls. And we ripped up the Astroturf out back and planted flowers. And somehow we weren’t going down to Carroll Gardens very much at all. And somehow I didn’t miss it. It had been good to me, sure, but I felt somehow liberated in my new hood. Almost immediately I began to chide myself for never having explored Astoria before, for having spent ten years living and playing mostly in a pocket of Brooklyn that was populated pretty much entirely by people like me. How boring.

My neighbors now are Bangladeshi and Greek and Russian and Japanese, and there are way more elderly Irish, Italians, and Jews than hipsters for sure. Helene a few doors down complains about the boom-boom music she hears every night; she signs for packages for me if I’m not home and sometimes even if I am. Eleanor next door dumps cold water on the lily of the valleys out front when she’s waiting for the kitchen tap to heat up. Meanwhile, my husband and I park in our driveway and marvel about the times when he used to try to come down to Carroll Gardens to see me but couldn’t find a parking spot. Each time, I’d have to pack a bag and hop in the car with him and spend the night at his place. I hated Brooklyn on those nights, almost as much as I hated Queens. But mostly, I guess, I hated change. I loved that I knew so many people in my neighborhood and that they knew me. I loved that I knew the neighborhood’s every shop and restaurant and bar and barfly. I loved that I’d been among the first of my kind to move there, to “discover” it. Brooklyn had become a huge part of my identity and I wasn’t sure who I’d be without it.

Now I know. I’m the same person I always was. Only now I have a subway station that’s above ground, and hydrangeas, and a dishwasher, and a skylight, and trick or treaters, and a lot more square footage than we could have afforded in Carroll Gardens, and, well, my husband. There’s a reason he stayed in Queens all those years. It’s down to earth. It lacks pretension. It’s just like him. And he’s the reason I’ve come to love our home, our borough. I don’t even dream of owning a brownstone in Brooklyn anymore; when we talk about movie deals now, we talk about a converted warehouse in Long Island City and a yacht docked in nearby Gantry State Park.

We got married, in the end, at a church here in Astoria, and had the reception on the waterfront in Long Island City. That bridge behind me in our favorite wedding photo isn’t Roebling’s, it’s the Queensboro. And still, I’m glowing. I don’t run into my old crew around the hood anymore, but when Nick’s longtime Queens pals, Pete and Jen, ride by on their scooter, I wave from my front stoop and think things haven’t changed much at all. When Diane and Michael from around the corner poke their head in when Nick and I are puttering in the garage, Astoria just feels like home.

Sometimes, when I’m watering the yard, or collecting the plastic-bagged circulars that appear on our porch each morning like maggots, I wonder, “How the heck did this happen?” But that’s the thing about love. It opens you up, challenges you, shakes you up before you even know what hit you. I was living happily in Brooklyn, sure, but in Queens, I’m living happily ever after.

My friend Angelo was dating a girl Gina who had been seeing this other guy from another neighborhood. We’d regularly hang out in Gina’s basement until she and Angelo would announce that they wanted to be alone. We’d all pile out into the adjacent and wait until they finished fucking. It rarely took too long.

One night, Gina’s ex-boyfriend, Doug, decided to pay her a visit and that’s where the trouble began. Angelo came to me for help and we chased (on foot) Doug’s Mustang away, tossing rocks and batteries at him.

Word spread quickly and soon we had about 15 guys milling around on Gina’s block. When nothing happened for about a half-hour, I guess everyone let his guard down a bit. That’s when the counterattack came.

About six or seven carloads of guys came screeching up to the corner and everyone took off-except me, Angelo, and Angelo’s younger brother, Pasquale. Don’t ask me why I didn’t run. I had a vague sense of loyalty to Angelo and Pasquale (they lived across the street from me) but no one would’ve blamed me if I took off. But I didn’t. I stood my ground with a bottle in my hand and when two or three guys pounced on Pasquale, I pulled them away.

Fortunately for us, no one started pummeling us right away. Instead, these idiots made the mistake of trying to humiliate us first. They had seen far too many movies and their feeble attempts at flair were laughable. In fact, when Doug hopped out of his Mustang, he did so in such a hurry that he left it in drive and the car rolled right in a garbage can. Pasquale and I stifled a laugh.

Anyway, like I said, we didn’t get our asses kicked because Doug and one of his larger friends circled us and played the taunting game.

“You like to throw things at cars, huh?” Shit like that. Big mistake.

Someone had run inside and told Gina’s step-dad, Pete, what was happening. Pete liked us, especially Angelo, so he didn’t like a bunch of punks fucking with us when we ere just defending our territory. Also informed of the situation was Timmy. He dated Rita, the girl who lived upstairs from Gina. Timmy was older than us and had a reputation around my way. (He ended up drowning at Rockaway Beach a few years later but that night…he was there when it counted.)

So Pete and Timmy come out and start shoving punks out of the way until they reach the epicenter of the fight. Timmy slaps a bottle out of one punk’s hands and sneers: “What the fuck you gonna do with that?”

The punk had no answer. We were still outnumbered about 25 to 5 but that punk backed down. Then came the fun part.

Pete picked out the biggest guy in the batch. Pete was not big but he carried himself like a brawler: early 40s, blue collar all the way. You definitely did not look at Pete and think “pushover.”

Pete grabs this guy by the collar, slams him up against a car, and gets his face about a fraction of an inch away from the punk’s face.

“Who wants to fight? Who wants to come on my fuckin’ block and fight?”

You could feel the confidence draining from Doug and his boys. Me, Angelo, and Pasquale started staring them down when Pete looks around at how many guys are surrounding him. Oh-so-slowly, Pete opens his flannel shirt to reveal a gun tucked into his belt: “Which one of you motherfuckers is first?”

I was in my glory. Doug and his band backed away towards their cars.

“And this better be the last time I see you around here,” Pete bellowed and they were gone. Pete winked at us, rubbed Angelo’s head, and left and we yelled “thanks” after him.

Little by little, our friends re-emerged. We were legends for not running and Pete’s show became part of the local lore.