Just a Quiet Saturday Night

         “Where’s my top?” I asked lazily.  A chill was starting to seep into me despite being under the covers.

          Eddie fished around for it. “Here it is,” he said and handed it to me. I pulled on the flannel shirt.  We resumed our cuddling, his right hand resting on my abdomen. The sound of a distant dog barking drifted in through the window of our yellow bedroom.     

            “Hon, get the TV,” I said to Eddie.  He sprang out of bed and walked the few feet to the living room. The TV was positioned on the side of the room that featured a wallpapered tropical scene. After cleaning and painting our apartment before moving in, we were no longer offended by the mural. It helped to fill the nearly empty room.

We were blissful newlyweds, married a few short months.  Our apartment building on Taylor Avenue, near the Bronx River Expressway, was in a row of dreary, pre-War apartment buildings. The brick wall of the next building was our view from the living room.  Our bedroom faced the rear of another building.

Eddie unplugged our little black and white set and wheeled the cart into our bedroom. He positioned it right in front of the bed of the tiny room. I loved looking at Eddie’s tall, lanky frame. He turned on the set and got back into bed.

“Who’s on Saturday Night Live?” I asked.  He leafed through the TV Guide on his night stand.  “It’s James Brown,” he answered.  “Oh great,” I said snuggling into him.

We watched the last 15 minutes of news before the show started.  A skit with Dana Carvey and host Jamie Lee Curtis opened the show. Then the familiar jazzy theme started and Don Pardo announced “It’s Saturday Night Live with musical guest James Brown” over a wailing clarinet.

It was Saturday, sweet Saturday.  No work the next day to worry about. We could be lazy for another day.

Upstairs the new baby started to cry and I groaned.  In the two months since moving into the building, I had passed our very pregnant upstairs neighbor in the entry hallway a few times.   Our eyes would meet briefly but no greeting was exchanged. I felt badly about that.

In the past week, sleep had been difficult for the new mom and me; the baby would wake us up at regular intervals.   Eddie was undisturbed. He could sleep through anything. 

I could hear the woman get up out of her bed above us and walk toward the kitchen, the baby wailing away.  After a few minutes I heard her walk back and the baby stopped crying.

 Eddie and I enjoyed watching the program for the next few minutes. Then the crying started up again.  I swore to myself that it would be several years before I had to deal with crying babies.

In the midst of the crying, I heard an apartment door fly open in the hallway and a man’s voice bellowing, “Shut that damn baby up!”  My eyes opened wide as I looked at Eddie.  I jumped out of the bed and ran past our tropical beach to the front door and looked out of the peephole. Our retired neighbor from across the hall was storming down the stairs from the next floor. He slammed his door.

I scurried back to our room shocked at his outburst yet laughing. More commotion soon ensued. 

The superintendent came up from his basement apartment and began pounding on the man’s door. He and his wife were Irish and had nine children.

Our neighbor across the hall refused to oblige.  Again I ran to the front door. From the comments, I had the impression the new mom had called the superintendent to complain about our neighbor’s outburst. Eddie was uninterested.  He just wanted to enjoy Saturday Night Live. He sat up in the bed, arms folded behind his head.

“There’s no need for that Frank,” yelled the super.  His wife and several of the children were behind him.

“What did Frank do?” asked one of the younger children.  “He said something bad about the baby,” said another.

The super gave up and walked away. “What an asshole,” he shouted.

Suddenly Frank’s door swung open and he stepped out into the hallway.

 “Call the fucken cops, why don’t you!” he demanded.

 “Oh what’s the matter with you?” demanded the super’s wife.  “Are you sick or somethin? That’s a new baby!”

“Call the fucken cops!” Frank raged and went back to his apartment slamming the door again.

I walked back to the bedroom appalled.  “Oh my God! I can’t believe that man! Who would do such a thing?”

“Frank would,” said Eddie.

We watched the rest of Saturday Night Live. Parodying Fred Rogers from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Eddie Murphy welcomed his neighbors to Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, an urban and grittier version of the beloved children’s program.

“Today boys and girls, I made a new friend,” he said in a syrupy tone as he changed into canvas sneakers, the way the real Mr. Rogers did. The audience laughed.

There was pounding on the door of the Robinson home. “Open up Robinson,” yelled a man. “I know you’ve been with Juanita. I’m gonna kill you!”

Eddie Murphy’s eyes and mouth opened wide in mock surprise.  “Boys and girls, Mr. Robinson is going for a little jog,” he said approaching a window and opening it to step out while the pounding and yelling continued. 

“We’re living in his neighborhood,” said Eddie dryly. I turned to look at him and laughed.  

Chicken keeping in New York City?

Chicken trainer, Lily Kesselman, shows workshop participants how to build a chicken tractor.

Chicken Keeping Workshops Come to the Bronx

Chicken keeping in the city? While it started out as a bucolic activity a few years ago,  chicken keeping has evolved into a serious niche in the sustainable food and urban agriculture movement. “I think it’s because people want to know where their food comes from,” said Greg Anderson, Urban Agriculture Manager for Just Food.   

Just Food supports community run farmers markets and its City Chicken Institute has sponsored over 21 chicken coop building projects in community gardens and a few schools throughout the city. They also offer monthly workshops for individuals interested in chicken keeping at Imani Community Garden in Crown Heights Brooklyn and, starting this year, at Paradise on Earth Community Garden on Fox Street in the Bronx.

The organization also has a City Chicken Meetup group with over 800 members and has discussions on chicken care such as problems and illnesses, coop design and where to find food.

“People are finding out that the way commercial institutions produce food is counter to their own beliefs and value systems,” said Anderson. “They want a bit more control over their food which I think is very similar to the popularity of farmers markets and green markets now.  People want that connection to their food.”

The organization decided to add workshops at the Bronx location because of the growing numbers of people attending their Brooklyn workshops.  Anderson said people have come from New Jersey and Connecticut to not only be educated on chicken raising, but also learn how to change the city ordinances of where they live to keep chickens. In New York City chickens are classified as pets and it is legal to keep them.  But don’t think about getting the hens a male companion. Keeping roosters is illegal due to their crowing.

Lily Kesselman, led the recent workshop in the Bronx and has been conducting chicken training for the last two years. Kesselman learned urban agriculture and animal husbandry from Just Food’s Farm School.  She filed for a grant to build a coop in Brook Park Community  Garden and then built one in her backyard.

“Just like I don’t think you have to be a vet to have a pet, I don’t think you have to be a farmer necessarily to have chickens,” said Kesselman.  She said chickens bring many benefits to a community garden and backyard including aerating soil, pulling weeds and eating food scraps that would normally go into the trash.  “I just think having chickens is really do able, and the eggs are far superior than what you’d buy at a grocery store.”

There’s also the question of how to deal with a chicken when it reaches the end of its egg laying cycle. Anderson said his organization only advocates keeping chickens for their eggs.  “After they stop laying, we can help people find places to send the chickens to.” He noted there are several farm sanctuaries upstate, on Long Island and even a few in Manhattan. But Anderson understands that people have different views about eating the chickens.

“Some people understand that after the chicken stops laying and before old age sets in that they may cull that chicken and eat it.”  Culling is the process of slaughtering the chicken for food.  “Some people view it as humane and others view it as inhumane.  That’s something we leave up to the individual.”

Future chicken keepers also need to know about urban predators.  “A lot of people move to the city and think there are no more prey animals. They let their chickens run around in their yard and they see a hawk come down and grab a chicken. Or they don’t lock their chickens up at night in a safe place and they come back and a raccoon has killed off their chicken,” said Anderson.

Michael Masefield learned about chicken predators the hard way. A former Staten Islander, Masefield has lived in the Bronx for the last ten years and was drawn to chicken keeping because he wanted something less urban in his urban environment. He came to the Bronx workshop to learn how to build a chicken tractor which allows a chicken to free range while being protected. “My chicken got attacked in the yard by a hawk and I wanted to build something to protect them,” he said. 

“Anyone who is looking to become a chicken keeper, educate yourself about the different breeds and what type of things this chicken will need to have a comfortable life,” said Anderson.

Workshops are offered through October in Brooklyn’s Imani Community Garden in Crown Heights on the second Thursday of the month and on the last Wednesday of the month in Paradise on Earth Community Garden on Fox Street in the Bronx.

 

 

From Memoir to Fiction: Maria Andreu Talks About The Secret Side of Empty

I wrote this piece for the June, 2015 edition of Voice of Youth Advocates Magazine.

In the midst of heated political debate about social issues, it’s the stories of people who live the experience that touches us in a way that facts and rhetoric cannot.  Maria Andreu’s book, The Secret Side of Empty has brought the debate over immigration reform to young readers’ attention. The book tells the story of M.T., a straight A student, whose blonde hair and fair complexion help hide her undocumented status. It’s a story that Andreu says was “born out of my deepest, ugliest secret” of being undocumented.

“It feels amazing and humbling,” said Andreu of the critical acclaim her first book has received, including being named to top Latino author lists by ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association, School Library Journal and Latino Stories.  

The book began as a memoir and then evolved into fiction.  It was a lesson, she said, in “letting a story tell you where it wants to go.” That direction was taking her own experience of being undocumented and showing how it impacts a child. “There is a lot of political debate about it and what the impact of it is. I wanted to show the human side of it,” she said.

Her parents were Argentinians who immigrated to New Jersey.  “They wanted to come to America, the promised land, with a plan of saving and working very hard and then going back home as so many people do, but life got complicated,” she said.

As early as four and five years old, Andreu began to hear conversations in the kitchen between her parents about activities they were not able to do and people being swept up in immigration raids. A trip to Argentina to attend the funeral of her grandfather, set her and her mother on a two-year odyssey to get back home to the United States and reinforced an identity of being different. “I felt out of place,” she recalled. Andreu attended first grade and part of second grade in Argentina.  Her father continued working at a restaurant in New Jersey.  “The kids were a little mean because I didn’t talk exactly the way they did. It very much had a quality of being on hold.”

The only way Andreu and her mother could get back home was through using a coyote (a person who smuggles Latin Americans across the U.S. border for a high fee). They travelled to Mexico to begin the journey back to the United States. Andreu remembers being in a shack in a remote location with nothing nearby but an outhouse. They depended on the coyote to bring them food.  Sometimes, he would take her and her mother for a walk. On one such walk, the coyote pointed off into the distance and told them they were seeing the United States. “That doesn’t sound right, because where is the imaginary line?” she thought. “It blew my mind to think that something about me made it so I wasn’t able or allowed to cross the imaginary line.”

Once safely home, Andreu finished her grammar school education at St. Joseph School in New Jersey and attended Holy Rosary, a girl’s high school. The feelings of confusion and embarrassment over her status intensified.  “I watched American TV and had friends, but there wasn’t the Internet and it was hard to communicate with others about things.  I didn’t talk to anyone about it.” As she got older, she saw her friends get jobs and driver’s licenses and began to feel her life narrowing.

As a high school senior, she was unable to attend her school’s National Honor Society trip to Europe.  She had to feign indifference when a teacher offered to obtain funding for her to go.  “I don’t know if she had a sense of my immigration status, but she knew we were poor,” she said.  “She pulled me aside and said, ‘Just say the word and I will find the money for you to go.’ I was so embarrassed. I thought she was seeing something so ugly about me. I was just like, it doesn’t matter, I don’t really want to go.”

After that, Andreu said she was in a dark place and didn’t see what the future could hold.  But when she was 18, she learned about the new law signed by President Reagan that granted amnesty to undocumented individuals who entered the country before 1982.  Not having to live with the fear of deportation was transformative, she said and she began her path to citizenship.

“For a long time I lamented that I had grown up this way,” she said. “Now I realize the resilience, strength and insights it gave me. “

Andreu enjoys connecting with young readers through her book and also in person. Speaking at Atlas DIY, an organization in Brooklyn, New York that advocates for undocumented youth, was particularly poignant. “I didn’t have any help to offer them but seeing their eyes light up and thinking someone felt what I feel, was very emotional,” she said. “It was the only experience where they cried and I cried.”

Andreu is also passionate about sharing her book with people who are outside of the immigration reform debate. “Obviously I want to touch people who understand the experience but I also want to touch people who have never thought about it before who say to me, ‘I never knew.’ I love that. It makes me so excited.”