Blog

The man I wanted to blog about today didn’t want anything to do with it.

“No publications!” he said.

“Uh, it’s just for a blog,” I told him.

His look said plenty. Blog. Blob. Slog. Slob. Slug.

His name is Chick and he owns a junk shop around the corner from my house. He is called Chick because he worked in a chicken factory on Columbia Street for years and years. He dropped out of school when he was quite young. I think he told me once that he was one of 16 children. He has ten great grandchildren now. Sometimes my husband and
I buy records from him. He is very much part of the old neighborhood here and so I suppose he looks on us as interlopers. I don’t take sides in the old neighborhood, new neighborhood divide. I like them both.

We live on 4th Place in Carroll Gardens above a family who has been in the neighborhood for a long time. Once I asked my landlady if she’d lived around here her whole life.

“No. I moved away once.”

“Where’d you go?”

“3rd Place.”

It’s against my Taurus nature to embrace change gracefully. But the truth is that –even more than loving old things (which I do) — I love old things that might soon be gone. At the end of last year I started drawing store signs from my neighborhood. Some of the locations are still in business, some are not. The signs have an elegance unmet by
today’s signage. Here are a few of the drawings.