Saturday Morning in Bensonhurst: Breakfast by Gravesend Bay at Bensonhurst Park

Due to spring break, we didn't have to teach our Short Story class on the Brooklyn College campus this morning, so we decided to have an early breakfast by the waters of Gravesend Bay in Bensonhurst.

Back in the late 1880s, when William Merritt Chase created his pastel Afternoon by the Sea (Gravesend Bay), Brooklynites enjoyed the view too, though they could see the traditional catboats back then.

We got here by taking the G train to Fourth Avenue/Ninth Street, where we changed for the D train to Bay Parkway. There we got the B6 bus at 86th Street to the Ceasar's Bay (yes, that's how it's spelled) Shopping Center on the other side of the Belt Parkway.

We came to this shopping center by car in the '60s and '70s, when the department store E.J. Korvette (along with Macy's, the best customer for our father and grandfather's Art Pants Company fine men's and young men's slacks, designed by Marc Richards and Jon Scott [us, our brothers and cousin]). There was later a KMart here, and now there's a Kohl's, a Best Buy, and other big-box stores, in addition to several banks and a Wendy's at the intersection.

Some fish must have gone shopping and left their cart by the rocks.

It was a glorious spring morning, and lots of people were out: mostly older ones, but a few young'uns too, running,

walking,

doing group calithenics

and individual tai chi

or just resting after a bicycle ride around the Belt Parkway.

Every garbage pail we saw was filled to the brim and even more, which was kind of disgusting.

In 1973-74, when we were in the master's program in English at Richmond College, we'd drive over the Verrazano-Narrows to classes and back to Brooklyn four days a week, sometimes more.

In the evenings a lot of times, we were still immersed in what we did in class that we'd find ourselves on the Belt Parkway

without having any memory of going over the bridge.


Two adult children, a brother and sister, were scattering their mother's ashes into the bay. We thought that was too private to take a pic of, but they left some flowers by the rail.


On the railing were reproductions of the sea life in the estuary,

which of course is where the sea water of the Atlantic Ocean meets the fresh water of the Hudson River and creates an incredibly vibrant ecosystem.

There's a tennis court and gym by the shopping center. People who don't know any better pay for parking meters here when they could just park for free at the lot just off the Belt Parkway (of course they may be coming from a different direction).

We had a nice couple of hours at the park

and then walked up Bay Parkway and across 86th Street, past where we used to help out at our family's old Pants Set store,

and back to the Starbucks near the 20th Avenue D train stop of the West End el.

It wasn't running into Manattan so we had to go to Coney Island and get the train home from there.

Good Friday Afternoon in Williamsburg: The Way of the Cross Procession at the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Around 1:30 p.m. today, we were at the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Metropolitan and Havemeyer (though the church is technically on North 5th Street) for the solemn Good Friday procession, the Way of the Cross.

A car with loudspeaker behind it played music as people filed out of the church.

Historically an ethnic Lithuanian parish since the early 20th century, the Church of the Annunciation still has Sunday masses in Lithuanian every week, in addition to the later mass in Spanish. (There are masses in English and Italian at Our Lady of Mount Carmel.)

As in other local commemorations of the Stations of the Cross today, children played a prominent role here. There were a lot of strollers in the procession.

Also a couple of bikes and at least one scooter.

As we were walking, we noticed this graffiti on the Metropolitan Avenue sidewalk.

Here's a video of a Williamsburg Good Friday procession in 2007:

HORSING AROUND IN POLITICS by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's Horsing Around in Politics is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 143-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

In these alternatingly hilarious and earnest memoirs, satirist and political activist Richard Grayson recounts moments in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s on the campaign trail and the political barricades.

There are reports from the police riot of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the takeover of the party by Grayson's young peaceniks four years later in Miami Beach; scenes from the New York headquarters of the October 1969 Moratorium, a nationwide general strike to protest the war in Vietnam; accounts of the first Earth Day celebration in Brooklyn, with a bike-riding Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and a rock band dressed as pigs singing about pollution, and later the same year, a now-historic 1970 "Women's Lib" action to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of female suffrage featuring feminist icons Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug.

Grayson also reports on his own political mischief-making: getting 26% of the 1982 vote for a seat on the Town Council in Davie, Florida, running on a platform of giving horses the right to vote; creating a political scandal involving Florida lawmakers in "Legislators in Love," and the wacky press coverage in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, People Magazine, and many news outlets of Grayson's joke candidacy for President in 1984, when he famously picked as his running mate the star of TV's "Falcon Crest," the actress Jane Wyman, because of "her experience in dumping Ronald Reagan."

Friday Morning in Manhattan Beach: Good Friday Breakfast at Manhattan Beach

On this beautiful Good Friday morning we made it to Manhattan Beach in less than hour from Williamsburg, thanks to quick connections on the B48 bus at Lorimer and Metropolitan, the B train at Prospect Park, and the B1 bus on Brighton Beach Avenue after we got a bialy and iced tea to take to the beach.

So we were here before 8:30 a.m. and it was beautiful to smell the salt air and see the ocean again.

This was "our" Brooklyn beach in adolescence and our twenties and was pretty much the same for kids like us who lived in southeastern Brooklyn and were driving in our teens. We remember one time when we'd driven here alone when we were about 20 and started chatting up the two girls at the next blanket. Finally one said, "You don't realize how old we are" and told us they were married women around 30. (Of course they'd assumed we were about 17, not 20.) We have a June memory of someone's transistor playing Beatles songs, and later, "Band of Gold." Today the bare trees made it clear that it is not yet June.

We first came here with our ninth grade friends from Meyer Levin J.H.S. 285 on the Brooklyn Day holiday in 1966. Unlike Coney Island or Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach didn't have a subway right there, nor stores or amusements. In those days the B49 bus, which we took on our way back, to the Sheepshead Bay Road Q/B station, didn't go into Manhattan Beach but ran only to the end of Ocean Avenue, and we had to walk over the wooden Ocean Avenue bridge over the bay and then through the streets of Manhattan Beach (the neighborhood) to get to the beach.

It's a lot smaller than Coney and Brighton to the east, a little curved cove of sand. To us, it's the nicest stretch of beach in Brooklyn except for the little private beach slightly to the east on the campus of Kingsborough Community College, where we taught between 1978 and 1980. In those days our step-great-grandmother Bessie Shapiro lived a few blocks away along with her sister Etta.

Ordinarily the buses are jammed with KCC students on weekdays, but this is spring break at CUNY and that's basically why we came today. The beach actually didn't look so good, with something we'd never seen before:

trenches of water due to the deluge downpour a few days ago, and there was sand on the concrete walkway. The sand also seemed darker and coarser than we'd remembered.

Mostly older people were about, jogging and speedwalking and chatting in Russian (or a few in Chinese), along with a couple of bicyclists.

It was nice to hang out and look at the water. The beautiful Marine Parkway Bridge is faintly off in the foggy distance here.

Thursday Afternoon in Williamsburg: April Fools' Day at Badame Sessa Triangle

This afternoon we walked up Leonard Street a few blocks to sit in the little park at Badame Sessa Triangle with some Diet Pepsi and a book (David Shields' Reality Hunger.)

It's a tiny park made by the intersection of Meeker Street, Leonard Street and Withers Street, created in the 1940s when they built the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

We used to think, carelessly, that it was Madame Sessa Triangle. We imagined Madame Sessa was a clairvoyant, like Madame Sosostris in "The Waste Land." April is the cruelest month on nearsighted eyes, but eventually we realized our mistake.

It's properly Badame-Sessa Memorial Square, named after two American soldiers in wars decades apart. Sergeant George G. Badame (1896-1955) fought in World War I and received a Purple Heart for his brave service in France. Private Michael Sessa, Jr. (1948-1967), a Brooklyn native, was killed in Pleiku, Vietnam on May 18, 1967. The memorial also honors fifteen other neighborhood guys, presumably around our age, who died in Vietnam.

Anyway, today some teenagers were texting on a bench and this youngish guy was playing with his Boston terrier when he wasn't doing dips on another bench.

This little dog wasn't responsible for the pile of shit too close to us. Calling Miss Heather!

Still, it got up to a sunny 70 degrees today, which was a good start for April.

MY PLAN TO KILL HENRY KISSINGER by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's My Plan to Kill Henry Kissinger is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 111-page $6.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

In these ten quirky, strangely compelling Richard Grayson stories — all of them first published in literary magazines and anthologies in the late 1970s — young people in their late teens and early twenties learn how to live in a world of weirdness:

A young man's mother hides under the bed while he has sex with his girlfriend. A porpoise directs and stars in a production of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" for an audience of one boy. A young woman claims her TV set won't work properly even though an attractive repairman assures her there's nothing wrong with it. A famous bodybuilder remembers his chronic childhood constipation. A 16-year-old boy tells an interviewer he aspires to be "a friend to the friendless." A delivery boy for a florist shop sees his first dead body. And in the title story, the roommate of a boy who couldn't stand anyone to say the word "Stanford" in his presence explodes in rage at former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with surprising results.

“The incessant familiarity of the writer’s secret self makes his world entertaining and bizarre. The dialogue is consistently, even ingeniously funny…bright and keenly made.”
— The New York Times Book Review

These stories originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following literary magazines and anthologies: Street Bagel (1980); Westbere Review (1977); Coffee Break (1978); Hudson River Anthology (1978); Dragon Fire, Dancing Dogs and Dangling Dreams (Meadows of Dan, VA: Northwoods Press, 1978); Beyond Baroque (1979); Lowlands Review (1978); The Penny Dreadful (1979); and Zone .