similar springtimes

School buses on spring mornings, idling under the clean baby green of the new-leafed trees that line up, good citizens of Brooklyn, on the sidewalks. Good kids wait in line, too. At the bus stops, they are all combed hair and silent concentration. Other kids run wildly up the side streets, desperate yet silent in a way the others aren’t. Your lives may or may not be harder, I say to the wild ones in my head. Who knows?

Mornings are quiet, controlled versions of the chaos of the afternoons and evenings here. Not quite awake, Brooklyn is full of wet flowers, walking dogs, loquacious crossing guards, silent joggers, and parents walking the combed kids to the bus stops, while the sober old men of Brooklyn, still asleep in their twin beds at the Van Westerhout Cittadini Molesi Cultural & Social Club, Inc., dream of the deep dark green of Vietnam in ’74 or of Sicily, in another world, in a similar springtime.