More than a Woman (from Brooklyn)

It's unmistakeable, the sound of Brooklyn.

What captured my attention, initially, was the large pineapple, festooned with flowers and grotesque facial features that appeared to be smiling at me as she sipped from the half inch of straw poking out at the top.

"I'll have what she's having," I told the waiter who materialized almost immediately as we planted our winter white behinds on some nearby chairs. The lady with the pineapple looked happy and relaxed. Kind of the look I was going for, other than bronze beach goddess, which seemed less attainable.

"Please, have the rest. I can't finish it." She was offering up the half-filled and apparently as yet untouched glass of spillover from her pineapple. Pink, not pale yellow as I would have expected. I changed my order to a garden variety pina colada but I was still mesmerized, not so much by the smiling pineapple but by her voice. I walked over.

She told me she was from Connecticut. She must have misunderstood my question. Where are you from? You can move a gal into Connecticut, but you can never remove the loud clatter of the elevated tracks on 86th Street, the ethnic mosaic of people on the move, the blaring horns, the ever-changing landscape of a single Brooklyn intersection. It wasn't just the accent that gave her away. It was the offer. People who are from Connecticut do not offer strangers the rest of their drinks, and if they do they don't really mean it.

Bensonhurst. The rest of the world only knows Bensonhurst and its surrounding neighborhoods as the gritty home of small pizza joints and mom and pop hardware stores and gangs of listless teenagers who hang out on street corners by day and dance in tight white disco suits by night. The anti-Connecticut, a place where you would think folks are more likely to steal drinks from you than offer them up.

Brooklyn is about as diverse as a place can be, and if I said that my upbringing on a largely Jewish segment of Ocean Parkway in the sixties and seventies was no different from that of an Italian girl in Bensonhurst I would be lying. But that accent, as intoxicating to me as it is offensive -- or at least comical -- to almost everyone else, brings me home.

We reminisced, my new friend and I, with heavy accents and light hearts, about the Famous, the sprawling cafeteria on 86th Street where my nana worked as a bookkeeper. I don't remember the food, but I remember sitting at the cash register with my nana, marveling at the speed with which she added numbers on that faded green spread sheet, not even needing a pencil to carry digits over a column. I loved the way all the customers knew her name, and she knew theirs. I love that I was able to remember my nana this way, before she declined and became somebody I barely knew and who barely knew me. She was smart and strong and independent, ahead of her time, really. And she could add a string of sevens like nobody's business.

My new friend didn't remember my nana but she sure remembered the Famous. The food, yes, but mostly the feeling of being there, probably a lot like the feeling I had when I would sit by the register with nana. The feeling of belonging to something important, and wanting to go back.

She joined us for dinner last night -- her friends were all detained by a bit of a blizzard -- and the sounds of her voice and the distant steady splash of waves brought me home, to the clatter of elevated train tracks and the blaring of horns and the comfort of an ever-changing but welcoming landscape.