Summer in the City

I received an e-mail from the New York Public Library announcing that the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights would be on display for 3 days prior the Fourth of July.  Standing on the steps of the main branch of the library on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, watching office workers navigating the heat during their lunch hour, I think back to my childhood in Bayside in the 1950’s where summer started with the Fourth of July

The Declaration of Independence was a declaration of summer for the children;  waves of heat and long summer evenings on 73rd Avenue, splashing in the small wading pools, lounging in pink pajamas on the lawn in front of our garden apartments, and freedom to roam wherever we wanted.

Reading and writing and history took a break.  School was out.

Handwritten on parchment, the founding fathers wrote gloriously.  I’m talking penmanship, which was as much a part of my schooling as history and was the beginning of my artistic life, or was it the Crayola crayon box with all the colors of the rainbow - my favorite was fuchsia, which in later years morphed into a deep rose pink.  

Francis Lewis, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, lived in Whitestone and had a Boulevard named after him, delineating the western- most boundary of Bayside.  When I pass it now on my pilgrimage back to my childhood, I cross a divide that is like a dream to me – separating my present life from my childhood in Bayside.   I often dream of Bayside; I dream of the garden apartment that I lived in with my family and in my dreams I cross Francis Lewis Boulevard, always in the summer, to get there.  Which is the dream and which is real – I’m no longer sure.

Some 55 years later or so, shooting the hoops in Central Park, the dappled leaves form a panoply as my eye follows the ball upwards and as I swivel to the right, the majestic buildings of Central Park West, where I first lived after leaving Bayside, appear in my vision.

I hear a flute – somewhere in the distance.  In Bayside I would hear screen doors closing or voices from within the doors wafting through the heat.  A family sits on chairs on the grass in front of one of the apartments on 218th Street and although I’m only a few yards from them, I can’t hear a sound.  The silence reaches me slowly through the heat.  Time stops.

I remember that first summer in Manhattan, celebrating at my 11th birthday party, playing in a huge plastic pool with friends on the terrace of our penthouse on Central Park West, strolling down Broadway in oppressive heat,  past Murray’s Sturgeon Shop and Wilby’s Bar and Grill, sitting under lampposts in the evenings and shooting the breeze with passersby, heat emanating from fluorescent lights and a lullaby of pneumatic drills piercing the concrete – far from Bayside, only by months, but a new and strange world , evocative and redolent of summer all the same.

Happy Fourth of July everyone!