industrial muffin factory

Mitting the smell in my memory, I walk up Smith Street, an incline gently rising toward the city where I've decided to live. Jackhammers and backhoes followed me here, from New Jersey where apparently many of them live. Now they rumble through the field a block away from our apartment, puncturing the morning with the sound of metal on metal. Is it strange that everywhere I’ve lived, something needed to be torn up or torn down? Strange machines crawl into the open fence every morning to do their work. This morning I found one, silent and hulking, in the church playground where the dogs run illegally. Rico peed on its tire, as tall as I am.

But even stranger things live here, live unseen here. For instance: the lovely smell that wafts over our neighborhood almost every morning. We puzzled over it for weeks: Is it the bakery on Court? Which one? Is it the bagel shop on Smith and 9th? No…What the hell is it? Nothing should smell this good, at the butt end of Carroll Gardens by the BQE, the refuse plant, the Gowanus Canal, and the Kentile sign for the love of god. But it does.

Then I found it. The industrial muffin factory is tucked away on 3rd or 4th or 5th St. off Smith, near the Gowanus in an unmarked warehouse, plastic curtains unable to hide its delicious secret. I saw the carts of muffins the other day, small workers scurrying away from the light. Making muffins, packaged and ready to go. From who knows where to us, the people of the light.

Other unseen things live here: As in, the man who makes his home in an old Chevy stationwagon parked on Smith, across from the Field of Destruction, just a few blocks south of the industrial muffin factory. This skinny man in a windbreaker survived the winter on Smith St. in his stationwagon, attached to which are all manner of containers and supplies, as if he were camping in the urban wilds of Brooklyn. Which I suppose he is. Or was – after his windshield got busted up by what was probably a baseball bat at the end of March, he was gone a week later.

But the machinery of destruction stayed. As did the delicious smell from the industrial muffin factory. The field is these creatures’ home, their work far from over, and the muffins are probably in the bodega on the corner in a neighborhood where some of us continue to live.