On September 11th, charred papers and photos from the WTC were strewn like leaves on my block. Found Magazine objects seem to have happier, or at least murkier origins. Nice site.

When I first moved to Manhattan, almost everyone I knew was between 25 and 30. The school you’d been to seemed much more important than your Old Country. In fact, some of the new arrivals seemed to regard Kentucky or Michigan as the Old Country, and the extreme cases thought that Harvard was.

Carroll Gardens is different still, despite all the chi-chi restaurants that opened for yuppies like me. Most people at Saturday’s party were Irish, Italian, or ‘half-and-half’, as Dominick says. Each side told jokes about the other. Matt, my Santa Claus neighbor, says:

“The Irish people and the Italian people, that can be a real beautiful mix for a marriage.”

Everyone wanted to know what part of Ireland I was from. Matt told me that his friend, Damian, who was killed in the Trade Towers, was one of nine kids of a family from Donegal. They all grew up in Inwood in the ’70s, when it was still an Irish neighborhood. Matt’s from the Bronx, but his family had a summer house in the Catskills next to all these Inwood families. Four Green Fields, they called it. Matt’s father would put on a brogue when talking with the rest of the Four Green Fields men, and the kids would tease him for it. Matt was a year or two younger than Damian and was dying to hang out with the bigger boys.

I realized I’d read a huge New York Times feature about Damian and Inwood a few weeks back. Sonuvagun, If Isn’t Dominion. The article isn’t online any more, but I remember that the whole family was crazy for Gaelic football. Damian was the youngest boy, and his father used to put him down to bed doing commentary on an imaginary match where the brothers all played on the same team.
“And Michael passes the ball to Sean…and Sean passes the ball to Eugene…and Eugene heads it over to Paul….”
The ball always ended up with Damian, and he always scored the winning goal. Lucky kid. He was golden, Matt says.

Dominick and Mary, my landlords, live on the first two floors of our brownstone. Implausibly, Dominick is “in the Christmas business”. When I moved in last April, he sheepishly outlined the rules for Christmas decorations:

“Anything you want inside the apartment, but we like to hang plain green wreaths in each of the windows for outside.”

My previous landlord was an elderly Russian-Jewish Bond girl, and wouldn’t have cared if I’d hung a live nude Santa on my front door. Especially not in April.

During my Thanksgiving vacation, Dom and Mary left three messages on my cellphone to arrange when they could get into my apartment to hang wreaths on the windows. I was amazed that people could think about such a thing in November, but I’d never seen Carroll Gardens at Christmas before. Besides the wreaths in every window, they have three Christmas trees in their apartment, and not a scrap of green is visible on any of them beneath the decorations. The backyard is full of life-sized, brightly-lit angels. Not puny, dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin angels; these are each as big as a well-fed nine-year old.

On Saturday night, they thew a Christmas party. They hired a piano player and a show-tunes singer, and persuaded my upstairs neighbor, Matt, to dress up in an elaborate Santa costume. Santa sat in front of the fireplace and handed out treats to all the neighbors. Dominick took Polaroids as they balanced on his meaty knees.

“Ho ho ho,” Santa boomed, “Where’s my shrimp? I was promised shrimp! Ho ho ho!”

He fled from heat exhaustion before the last presents were distributed.

Someone hired two salsa dancers who danced wildly with blow-up doll women. The blow-up doll women chipped away further at my dancing confidence, though I now have hope that if I were actually strapped to the feet and hands of a competent lead, I might amount to something. Feminism’s loss is aesthetics’ gain.

Then everyone gathered around the piano and sang carols and standards. Dom and Mary danced cheek-to-cheek, expertly. We were all well-fed and glowing with wine and twinkly lights and good cheer. They weren’t my friends and neighbors, exactly, but I was glad to learn that the spirit of Christmas movies can be real, sometimes.

Is it wrong to love a borough this much?

I wore a t-shirt to the office this morning. 65 degrees and sunny on December 1st. I think Manhattan is pretending to be Santa Barbara to bring the tourists back.

I wore a t-shirt to the office this morning. 65 degrees and sunny on December 1st. I think Manhattan is pretending to be Santa Barbara to bring the tourists back.