The Five Reasons I Love Brooklyn: Siri Hustvedt
1. Walking down Seventh Avenue and listening to snippets of conversation on the street: people barking complaints into cell phones; a child frozen on the sidewalk, wailing “I want pizza!” as her father crouches beside her and tries to talk her into an alternative plan; pedestrians yelling at drivers for infractions; and the bits and pieces of languages spoken that I cannot understand, but which resonate with feeling nevertheless.
2. Watching the cricket players in Prospect Park.
3. The flower man at Apple Tree market who carefully wraps up my amaryllis with tissue to keep the blooms safe.
4. Every single person at Blue Apron on Union Street and Seventh Avenue, because their good will and humor are a balm to their customers. I also love their cheeses.
5. Park Slope because I live here. I have lived in the neighborhood for 25 years. Its streets and houses; its ubiquitous characters; the F train entrance at Ninth Street; Grand Army Plaza, where I take the 2 or the 3; the Brooklyn Museum, with its old and strange American portraits; the park where I took my daughter, now grown up; where I walked my dog, now dead; where I still go to air my mind, have become the geography of my memory, as well as the cityscape of my everyday life.