A View from the (Brooklyn) Bridge

Growing up in Brooklyn, I assumed that what was familiar was normal. Accents that suggested illiteracy, childhood games played on punishing concrete with an occasional death defying dash into the softer turf of roads filled with oncoming traffic, subway stations that smelled like urine.

Sounds rough, I suppose, but there was order, and there was predictability. Dad walking in the door at six, dinner on the table at 6:02 -- fruit, salad, broiled meat or fish, a vegetable, potato, my favorite cake from the local bakery. One slice only. The world beyond, a world without portion control -- or any noteworthy restrictions, really -- caught me by surprise, left me fat, directionless, confused.

My brother and I used to tinker with the notion that maybe our way of life was not "normal," that maybe other families did things differently, that maybe our family was actually crazy. Even if we thought it was possible, we happily dismissed the idea. There is comfort in the knowledge, however misguided, that you are at least somewhere on the spectrum of what is typical.

Sure, there were hints along the way. At fifteen, on a cross country bus tour with other teenagers from my neck of the woods, I remember overhearing some locals comment on us as we straggled into an eatery somewhere between Nebraska and California. Must be from New Jersey, they whispered. Okay, close enough. Jewish, I heard. Okay, not 100 per cent, but again, close enough. How did they know? I glanced over at them, the locals who lived somewhere between Nebraska and California, and they didn't look all that different to me. Maybe they would have, had I spotted them trying to blend in on Avenue J.

Then there was college, a world relatively low on folks who said things like cawwwfee and chawwwcolate or added a gratuitous "r" to the end of my name. A world filled with kids who already drove their own fancy cars and had never smelled a subway and who knew what it was like to play in a field of grass without being shipped off for eight weeks during the summer. A world with loose schedules and no portion control. By the time I graduated, I had acquired a hybrid accent, friends from small towns who had never before met a Jew, and a good forty extra pounds.

My idea of normal has long since undergone a significant overhaul, and I have adjusted to a world where I can celebrate differences and sameness and, no matter what, always seem to find common ground. At least until recently. I worry about our new normal, where lies are treated as truths and it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two. Where mainstream is viewed as subversive and what once may have appeared to be abnormal -- if not outrageous -- has become acceptable, quite fashionable even.

I feel fat, directionless, confused. I am tinkering with the notion that maybe my way, and the way of many I know, is not normal. That what I have always believed to be sane might actually be crazy. Finding myself in a world that has become a veritable smorgasbord of bat shit craziness, I yearn for the days of portion control.