Slices of Life

My childhood friend, who has already had a year filled with too much tragedy and loss, is now dealing with the aftermath of "superstorm" Sandy. With her suburban home temporarily uninhabitable, she is seeking refuge in the Brooklyn apartment where she grew up. An apartment where her vibrant mom always was, and now is not, having succumbed to cancer this summer.

She is as strong willed and seemingly invincible as her mom was, yet my friend suddenly feels as powerless as the fuses in her house. She berates herself for being cranky, knowing others suffered far more damage from Sandy than she did. "What's my excuse?" I asked her as I sat sipping my coffee in a warm and cozy Starbucks eight hundred miles away from the devastation, my east coast family members safe and fully wired. I am as cranky as they come. Cranky because my chronically aching hip kept me from running a race with my daughters, and I have been relegated to the role of chauffeur and, after I finish my coffee, shivering spectator.  Honestly, though, there are lots of folks out there who have it a lot worse than I do. Ya think?

Trying to conserve the precious ounces of gas she has left in her car, my friend has taken a few strolls down our gritty Brooklyn memory lane. As if the ongoing news of Sandy's aftermath isn't shocking enough, she informed me yesterday that our old candy store, Morty & Eddie's, is now called Halal Chinese and Afghan cuisine. It makes me wonder what the kids in P.S. 217 do after lunch. Are they imaginative enough to hide aromatic Asian food in their desks? Worse still, have they never known the pleasure of sucking quietly on a jawbreaker for an hour to wash away the taste of a peanut butter sandwich? Must they suck on an eggroll instead, try to concentrate during those sleepy afternoon hours while picking stringy vegetables from their teeth?

Time passes, and things change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but either way we cannot help but yearn for what used to be. Yesterday, as I wandered down the northern stretch of State Street in Chicago's Loop for the first time in years, I was shocked to see how different it looked from a day, more than twenty-seven years ago, when I had found myself there for the first time. It was dirty and crowded and seedy and tacky. It is still tacky, but in a sterile sort of way. Old run down discount shops have been replaced by gargantuan bargain chain stores with polished windows and colorful signs advertising enticing sales. There are fewer panhandlers, no homeless folks huddled in doorways wearing countless layers of clothing. Like the dusty shelves and narrow passageways of Morty & Eddies, now supplanted by something called "cuisine," the grit of State Street has been overrun by the illusion of glitz.

I know it's not so much the grime that I miss; it's simply the old days. Jawbreakers were a lot of work. Morty & Eddies was claustrophobic. State Street was downright icky. But, then again, back in those days, all our parents seemed invincible, my hip didn't feel like it was about to break in two, and my friend didn't have to fret about what her house was going to look like when she finally returned  from her surreal visit to the apartment in which she grew up.

The good news, or the sad truth, I suppose, is that years from now my friend and I and lots of others like us will look back upon the fall of 2012 and think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And we all know full well there's nothing so special about sliced bread.