THE VIEW OUT THE WINDOW

As a little boy I was a clueless homogenized dorky white kid from Queens New York. Yeah, I know, I know… now I’m a slightly less clueless homogenized dorky white middle aged man from Queens New York. It’s okay; if age has done one good thing for me it has made me comfortable in my own skin (most days). Life is way, way too short to worry about past cluelessnesses and last I checked, the time machine was still busted so all those ‘if I knew then what I know now’ thoughts are still pretty useless chatter good only for belly up to the bar conversation with brand new best friends.

Back when I was a kid I thought I understood my sliver of the Universe but in reality I was kinda oblivious. I had no ability to see things from multiple perspectives; I knew the New York sky was often a bit grey but I did not realize the whole world was grey instead of that much more comfortable black or white. Either way New York is an interesting place to grow up because you have a plethora of people from all walks of life crammed randomly together like a multi-pack bag of mini candy bars, yet like myself, most do not see the world past their little neighborhood of sameness until they leave and come back. It is strangely similar to growing up in a small town except your isolated hamlet is instead a handful of city blocks. I can remember not being able to cross the street alone unless my Mom had her head out the window to make sure I looked both ways for danger before wandering a few feet away from my world onto the next block. The City can make you worldly quick but you have to step out of your box first.

My childhood was during the early era of school integration. A few African American kids were bused in from Brooklyn to my very German / Italian uber white bread public elementary school. One of those kids was Kevin who quickly became one of my best ‘school’ friends. Although after class we talked on the phone, I never visited the neighborhood he lived in. Except for the difference in skin color of most of the people there, it most likely looked the same as my middle class area but in the early 1970s it might as well had been another planet. On the streets of Kevin’s neighborhood, dorky Dan would have stood out like a pasty white snowman on a summer afternoon and back then I was ill-equipped to deal with being outside my little bubble.

Kevin’s Dad was a pilot and when we were in the fifth grade he invited me to fly for free with his family to Hawaii. Don’t worry; we weren’t that oblivious. We devised a plan to tell everyone I was the white sheep of the family. Even though our respective parents were amused, they put the kibosh on that trip but that kind of sums up my perspective thing. We knew there were differences yet I really did not grasp how different my middle class casually Jewish background was from his heritage or anyone else’s for that matter.

I always knew there were people and places different to what I was used to. Every few months wide-eyed little Dan sat backwards in the way-back of the family’s early 1960s station wagon as we all trekked into the City. The Queens neighborhoods looked different than mine towards the East River. Over the Williamsburg Bridge and down Delaney Street in Manhattan through the rear window glass I saw the rough looking inhabitants of the Bowery pass quickly into the alleys and corners of the night.

Bustling Little Italy looked nothing like where I lived; alive and full of people loudly laughing and eating at restaurant tables right on the sidewalk up and down Mulberry St. Just a few feet away the world changed again; Canal Street looked like a cross between a demented flea market and a dirty farm stand. The sidewalks were so jam packed with people selling exotic vegetables, knock off watches, tools, toys, clothes and electronics that you often had to step into the street just to get around the mass of humanity.

The City was full of thousands of restaurants but we always ate at the same place. Dad navigated the boat of a car down curvy Mott Street into Chinatown where the world changed yet again. Even the store signs were in a complete different language here. Although it was only about 11 miles in actual distance from my house, through the Joy Garden Restaurant’s two little second story windows, a whole different universe moved before my eyes.

The best part about dinner in Chinatown was after we finished eating my folks let us kids go across the street to the little gift shops. Again, Mom would watch us cross the congested street through the upstairs restaurant window. My parents got to enjoy a minute or two of peace while us kids got to poke around all the unusual (to us) Asian trinkets, toys and souvenirs. Eventually Mom and Dad would meet us there and we each were allowed to spend some pocket change on a small rinky dinky toy akin to the stuff you find in those 25 cent grocery store toy dispensers. It was a small price for them to pay for the quietness of a few minutes without the kids up in the restaurant.

When I got older I moved out of New York but then started visiting up there… a lot. The combination of age, experience and living elsewhere allowed me to see how small my little bubble was growing up. I still struggle sometimes with taking the blinders off and understanding that each and every person has their own views and perspectives. No one is always right but no one is always wrong.

The polluted skies over New York have cleaned up a lot since I was a kid but the world is still crammed full of grey. In these modern days full of hate crimes, anger shootings, extremist politics, ISIS and confederate flags it seems we are focusing more and more on the differences. Maybe when this clueless homogenized dorky white kid from Queens New York wanted to pretend to be the white sheep in black friend’s family, he wasn’t that crazy. Just taking baby steps to look at the world differently but see that we really are all the same.

Joy Garden Sign (upper right)