Reverse Migration

My most important ties to life run through the narrative histories of family members and close friends, and the places where we staked out our homes and livelihoods. Thirty-five years ago, I wasn’t doing so well financially, out in Lawrence, Kansas, where I hail from. So I dropped everything, and left for the northeast to seek a better life in film and television, just like dad had done in reverse from Brooklyn. That Brooklyn townhouse was a world away from the suburban Kansas City neighborhoods I was growing up in as a Missouri native. In Brooklyn I got the full experience of my dad’s Russian-Jewish heritage in an ancient, creaky, sandstone row house packed with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbors, where the wonderful odors of meals in preparation wafted from my grandparents’ home. I loved the way everyone lived on top of one another.  I loved the sense, out in the street, that the world was one big feast and celebration, fueled by a longing for satisfaction so well represented by the scent escaping from a block full of kitchens on Vernon Avenue. Life was about feeding time, at the cellular level. Eating.

Twenty-five years later, after my grandfather died in that Brooklyn townhouse, I picked up stakes and drove east once again, taking with me my grandfather’s immigrant entrepreneurialism. Arriving well after nightfall, I found a cousin staying a few blocks west of where grandpa had lived and worked, with his sign-painting business, on Grand Street. And that night Grand Street smelled just like my childhood memories of Brooklyn.
 
I couldn't have had a better life in all the years since, as it turned out that Grandpa somehow had watched over and protected me in the shadow of all those dreams and memories and fragrances of cakes and pies and pasta rising into the heavens. I wish I could tell him, “Grandpa, I’m in New York.”

Mark Kaplan

2016 May 14