Living on the water

As a young urban kid, I looked forward to our summer vacations.  My parents would rent a house in a lake community in Connecticut.  We would swim everyday unless it was raining.  I loved sitting by the lake and watching the changing face of the water as the day moved along and the light gave way to various shades and shadows.  I remember the last of the summer nights in late August when the community got together for a big clambake that usually ended with a bonfire on the beach.  We would look up at the Milky Way as orange sparks flew up from the crackling wood fed fire.

When I was old enough to go to high school, I attended a school that was a stone's throw from the boardwalk that faced the Atlantic Ocean in Rockaway Beach.  I remember my entire Latin class gazing out the windows at the ocean as it roared  and crashed onto the winter beach.  Soon after I graduated the good sisters had the good sense to turn that particular room into a meditation chapel.  In the early days of summer we would often just go onto the sand after dismissal, some of the more daring among us, having worn bathing suits under our Catholic girls' uniforms, would quickly ditch the plaid skirts and jump into the briny water.  I learned to bodysurf on that beach.

Moving to Staten Island in the seventies meant that I commuted to my then bank job in Manhattan every day by train and ferry.  It was, and still is, a wonderful way to start and end a work day.  The ferry technically has no right of way in the harbor and must slow down or stop for the larger freighters and tankers that crisscross the harbor on the workdays.  On the weekends, they navigate around departing cruise ships and liners while private motorboats and sailboats loopily circle around them.

Come to think of it, I have spent the vast majority of my life on islands.  Even though I was born the Bronx, the only borough of New York City that is technically on the mainland of North America, I have spent most of my adulthood living either in Brooklyn...a part of Long Island or Staten Island.  I like the smell of salt air.  It reminds me of home.

So it came as no surprise, at least to me, that when I sold my big old house a mile from the ocean, I bought a condo that faces water.  I overlook the New York Harbor, the middle bay area. I can see from Jersey City to the Atlantic Highlands on fogless days. I can see the trucks, buses and cars stream along the Belt parkway and watch them zip across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge...well, sometimes they kind of drag across the bridge, if truth be told.

And it is wonderful waking up in the morning and gazing out my bedroom window at the sun rising over Brooklyn.  In the evening it is the moon that glows over Fort Hamilton High School. I get to see the intricate commercial comings and goings of this wonderful harbor town. It changes from hour to hour, sometimes minute to minute.  Its waters are blue and green and grey and brown all at once and then it changes again and again and again. And then there are the birds: gulls and terns, pigeons, falcons, hawks, ducks, egrets, barn swallows, sparrows and starlings.  They swirl and swoop in an aerial ballet that never ceases to amuse me.

I think I really like it here.