The Opening Gate
Circumnavigate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. . . thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.
Yesterday – a sunny Sabbath Sunday – I took a Brooklyn family on a bike tour of the Manhattan and Brooklyn shoreline, and stole the opening lines of Melville’s Moby Dick to set the atmosphere for our circumnavigation.
By the time we reached the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, we had already passed dozens of neighborhood businesses that had closed up during the pandemic. Ten minutes after I took the photo above, we rolled by Damien Nesbit’s Dog Day Cyclery, which used to be my local repair shop. Damien, his dad Bill, and the rest of their crew had often come to my rescue when flats or mechanicals grounded me or my Rolling Orange tour guests. The shop’s big rolling metal gate was drawn down; Dog Day’s days had ended.
When I rose yesterday, it was with the thought that Masquerade has been asleep for long enough, and it was time to wake it up. Moments before I opened our front gate to mount our steps after a long day of touring, a passerby said “I like your look, man.” A moment later a young couple passed me; the woman was wearing a fantastic chartreuse jumpsuit and big costume hoop earrings of the same hue – and the same hue as my chiffon chartreuse scarf.
It was an easy opportunity to pass on the compliment I had just received. Caroline and her boyfriend Jack then told me that they had that very day moved back in to the neighborhood, having left in April of 2020, weeks after the lockdown began. I remember seeing the moving truck. That set me thinking about those days – which gave me the impulse to begin this blog that week of April Fools Day, 2020.
Then this morning this note from a reader in Germany appeared in my inbox:
Hello Kavin, how are you doing?
We are building a parallel society here!
Are you still doing the Masquerade blog. . . I don’t get the posts. . .
Greetings, Stef
And so today I start again. I thought that I would go back and take photos of Damien’s closed shop, and some of the others we had passed yesterday. But then, as I was going out the gate, I heard a neighbor’s gate creak. It was Curtis, who lives three doors down, going out to water his little cherished strip of green flanking our flagstone sidewalk. Then another creaky gate, as one of my next door neighbors on the other side came back in from her morning yoga class.
Fran Turley and her husband Bruce have been beautifying the front piazza of Fran’s sister’s old brownstone row house at 421 Clinton Avenue for over 25 years, but never has it been as glorious as this past summer. Going up our steps, not only do I get to enjoy the petunias, geraniums, cosmos, morning glories; I have carte blanche to pinch as much basil as I need for pesto or caprese salad.
This morning, someone’s neatly curated CD collection was out on the sidewalk, for the taking. Already ransacked of most of the CDs, the liner notes and covers left intact, I salvaged Tom Waits’ Mule Variations; Nina Simone’s After Hours; Neil Young’s Year of the Horse; and The Best of Blondie – to give to my friend Ben, who still has a crush on Debbie Harry.
The creaking gates of my near neighbors saved me from my sadness about Damien’s closed and bolted Dog Day Cyclery gate. I went back inside thinking about opening gates, about resilience and perseverance and hope. How very fitting that Cathline had just sent me a link to this amazing story of the Venice artisan whose Noah’s Violin gives hope to all Venetians – and to another littoral world city shaken by Corona Time and the threatening rising tides both literal and metaphorical.