A Park in Brighton

Elizabeth Milligan
Writing Assignment
February 25, 2008
Prompt: “…it is the moment that lends significance to things.” - A.J. Heschel


A Park in Brighton

1987

When I was first married, I moved from an apartment in Houston to my husband’s apartment in Brighton. Human storage modules, that’s what my husband called the apartments there. The building was six stories high and all units had three levels, parquet floors, floor-to-ceiling sliding doors, and connecting balconies overlooking a small triangular-shaped park. Except for glass windows and metal railings on the porches, the entire building was water-stained gray concrete. In the cavernous lobby, a huge goose-in-flight was painted on the part of the dropped concrete ceiling that angled down and over visitors and tenants.

Cherry trees and a black wrought iron fence circled the entire perimeter of the park. Commonwealth Avenue ran along the outside. Once-elegant row houses and a synagogue, B’nai Moshe, faced Sutherland Street on the opposite side of the park. The Bluestone Bistro, a pizza house, Little Korea, a restaurant with displays of plastic food in the curtained front window, and Chiswick Arms, our 1960s-vintage apartment building, fronted the narrowest and shortest side, Chiswick Road.

Most of the park was grassy, dotted with saplings, and crisscrossed with gently rolling paths. Playground equipment was scattered over the sandy strip of the park nearest our apartment building. Peeling green benches, cultures, and generations mixed in the park.


1989

Every week day morning at ten, children and young teachers from B’nai Moshe’s new preschool would hold hands, form a line, and thread their way into the park. The few other park regulars tried to arrive early in order to have first dibs on the playground equipment.

Russian grandmothers would bring their grandchildren. If the grandmothers did not live nearby, they arrived by an early morning T-train; there was a stop a few yards away from the park. The children played in the sandbox and on the jungle gym - always keeping an eye out for an empty swing. The grandmothers would find nearby park benches facing the sun and sit there all day. Plastic bags of carrot sticks, tubs of whitefish and eel, crackers, knitting, and band-aids bulged their dress pockets and cloth bags.

It seemed that all Russian grandmothers produced at least one apple a day. They pared the apple in a single continuous and spiral motion, cut the pale globes into sections, and called out to grandchildren – all of whom came running. I would mime my desire to try to pare an apple like they did. Instead, the grandmothers just smiled and proceeded to teach me how to count in Russian and when to say “Dosvedanya” and “Spasiba”.

Before dinner, the young Russian mothers would arrive at the park from their jobs. All of them would be smartly dressed and coiffed. Unlike their mothers, the young women had learned to speak English well. Most had been professionals in Russia, doctors and engineers, and none had licenses to practice their expertise in the United States. Until they would, they worked as computer technicians or manicurists.

One late afternoon, after I crossed the park and headed for the gate nearest my apartment building, I stopped to greet the six or seven young Russian mothers sitting on the two most shaded park benches by the sandbox, talking animatedly. One of them invited me to join them. As soon as I smiled and replied “Da”, they all welcomed me - and slid into English.

In the early evening, the Russian fathers and the fathers of the most recent neighbors, the Brazilians, would return from their jobs and play with their children. On one particular evening, Boris felt that his son had been slighted by Bruno’s son and each man threatened to fight the other. I don’t recall that their confrontation was any more than raised fists and loud threats, but soon after that incident, the Russians moved away from the park.

The Brazilians lived across from the park in the old apartment buildings with ornate plaster trim on Sutherland Road. Except for preparing meals or orchestrating parties, the Brazilian mothers were in the park with their children almost all day. After dinner, the fathers and their children would return to the park to play until dark.

On spring evenings, the scent of cherry blossoms mingled with hot fragrant steam from red beans, rice, steak, and plantains which wafted across the park from the Brazilians' open kitchen windows. Twilight shadows embraced the park, the globes of light from street lamps, the cars parked bumper-to-bumper along both sides of the streets, and the chattering pedestrians. On such an evening, I joined Barbara, my good new friend from down the hall, on her balcony. Hanging over the railing, Barbara sighed: “Doesn’t it look just like a Hollywood movie set? … This is why Harold and I can never move from here. It is so beautiful.”


Marianne and her younger brother, Eduardo, adored my curly-haired one-year old daughter. Eduardo thought she was a doll. Often, he would clutch her in a bear hug and tote her about the park until she wriggled free.

Marianne and Eduardo’s parents invited our family to Marianne’s twelfth birthday party. On the evening of the party, my daughter wore a nice but not fancy dress. My husband and I dressed casually – jeans and a skirt. When Marianne’s mother answered the door, we smiled and handed her our birthday present. She ushered us into a living room packed with gifts, music, food, and their many, many friends and family from Brazil. Both adults and children were stylishly dressed for the birthday party. The guests scrutinized us with polite curiosity, smiled at us, and mingled with the others. The children moved into Marianne and Eduardo’s bedroom to jump on beds and scream with abandon.


1990

In the spring, a Japanese mother and her child and some Korean families joined us in the park. The Japanese mother’s husband was interning at Beth Israel and the Korean families owned the nearby restaurant, Little Korea, and convenience store, The Huntington.

On Halloween, we – the Brazilians, the Koreans, the Japanese, and my daughter and I - met at Eduardo and Marianne’s apartment. My husband stayed at home, lowering an Easter basket of candy from our balcony to the few trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk below. The little Japanese boy – a baby, really - was dressed as a Japanese spirit in a white pillowcase with three slits for eyes. His mother told us that in Japan, the third eye was for good luck. My daughter wore a NASCAR mechanic’s jumpsuit from K-Mart. Everyone else was either a Disney-fairy tale character or an American Superhero.

The following July, on the afternoon of my daughter’s second birthday party, the Brazilian mothers helped me tie blue, green, and red balloons to branches of trees in the park, the Japanese mother helped me serve the cake and ice cream to anyone who asked for some, the Korean families from Little Korea presented my daughter with a large construction-theme set of Du Plo blocks, and the Bluestone Bistro owners brought over a tub of dry ice for the theatrical effect; they thought the children would get a kick out of it.

That fall, our Brazilian neighbors began moving to new homes away from that neighborhood in Brighton. Barbara died, and Harold asked me to sit shiva for her. We moved a year later.