Signs

One afternoon in Brooklyn, I saw something that changed my life

I think a lot about the Park Slope apartment, utterly unattainable now. It would break my heart to walk by the building again, so I’ve never been back. It was the first floor of a brownstone, spacious, with an eat-in kitchen and a full bath.

That apartment could have been beautiful - a cozy home, an oasis. But I lived there with my boyfriend and we did not decorate it. We did not make it cozy or beautiful. To do so would have been an act of love.

If you had asked me at the time if I loved him, I would have told you yes, and I probably would have believed that to be true. If you had asked me if he loved me, I would have told you yes, but even then, I would have known I was lying.

As a couple, and as individuals, we were miserably unhappy.

There were things I tried to do to change that fact. I learned to make homemade biscuits, for example. I paid for cable TV. I ordered pizzas and picked them up around the corner from the place with the toy train in the window. The pizza in Brooklyn was delicious, but it could not create love where there was none.

Our home was never home because we were not a home for one another.

One afternoon, I was walking up Seventh Avenue toward 10th Street when I saw a flier on a telephone pole. It was the mid-nineties and stapling a flier to a telephone pole was the primary way people communicated about tag sales, shows, and other events. Telephone poles, in fact, were covered in sheets of copy paper, some white, some bright.

So, I’m not sure what it was about this particular piece of paper that caught my attention, but it did. It drew me to it like a magnet. I was compelled to walk up to the telephone pole in question and read the flier, which seemed to glow, everything surrounding it blurred into the background. BROOKLYN WRITERS it said, with a telephone number on tear-off strips at the bottom.

I do not like to make phone calls. I do not like to call people I know, so I sure as hell don’t like to call people I don’t know. But I tore off one of those little slips of paper and slipped it into the zipper pocket of the woven Guatemalan bag I carried and when I got home - where my landline telephone sat on a stool in the kitchen - I dialed the number. Thankfully, an answering machine picked up. I left my message and soon enough a return message was left for me and I had a time and date and address.

The writer’s group was in Carroll Gardens, a neighborhood I liked to walk through because of all the Virgin Mary front yard grottos. Brooklyn Writers met in a warmly lit brownstone, a first floor apartment like mine, but unlike mine, this apartment was decorated in soft earth tones and amber lamps.

We met in the living room, seating on a circle of pillows. The leader of the group was a kind soft-spoken woman. She told us on the first night that her master’s thesis was languishing on the shelf, but it was clear she was a real writer, an intellect, and knowledgable guide.

We wrote, the group of us, with a passion. We met once a week and spent the first hour spread out around the place, curled over our notebooks, writing. We had a snack - apple juice and ginger cookies - then came back to the circle to read and respond to what we had written.

Bi-weekly we had the opportunity to pass around copies of a polished piece for the members of the group to take home for critique at the next meeting, but our host gave us firm rules for critique that I have never forgotten. “You can not criticize,” she said, “before first saying what you love about the piece.” Her theory was, if you didn’t know what was working, or what the writer was attempting to do, you had no grounds for saying what wasn’t working.

It was a brilliant framework in which to work.

It doesn’t happen so much anymore, but it used to be that people would say about New Yorkers that they were rude or unkind. Whenever I would hear such a thing, my mind would always go to the Brooklyn Writers. They were each so smart, so talented, but also so incredibly kind and generous.

We were a community. We supported one another’s creativity and individuality. We truly desired one another to succeed. We even gave a reading once at the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in Union Square. Brooklyn Writers gave me this opportunity - to stand at a podium and face an audience and read a story I had written about my childhood in Kentucky, in New York City.

It was this writer’s group where someone first suggested to me that I should, or could, pursue my MFA. Brooklyn Writers gave me the confidence to dream about that possibility, so on my dial-up Internet, I began to search for MFA programs. I didn’t tell my boyfriend at first what I was doing because going to graduate school began to feel like my way out of the relationship. I would move away to go to school and he would certainly not follow me.

But as I visited websites and read about programs one emerged as the place where I belonged. It was a school I had wanted to apply to as an undergraduate, but had not because of financial constraints and bad advice, but here it was again. This was a well-known program. Competition would be fierce, but when I read the philosophy of the school, the list of professors, the list of graduates, there was no place else I wanted to be. I wanted this - I wanted to study in this program - more than I’d ever wanted anything. And it was in New York. Not even New York State, but suburban New York. A 30-minute Metro North ride from Grand Central.

I made my application. One of my former professors asked me where else I was applying and I said, “Nowhere.”

“Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket,” she said, but it was the only basket in which I wanted to put eggs. I knew it was foolish. I knew I probably wouldn’t get it in. I knew I should have a back-up plan, but I wanted to go to Sarah Lawrence. I felt, in my heart and in my bones, that I was meant to be there.

When my letter arrived I was terrified to open it, but I did open it. I stood in my spacious Park Slope kitchen, that could have been so sunny and warm if only a loving couple lived in it, and read the news that, not only had I been accepted, I was receiving a small merit-based scholarship.

I knew most graduate students would not be living in the small village and would instead be commute to class from the city. I knew, even then, that my large apartment in Brooklyn was a treasure that no one in her right mind would relinquish, but I was ready to relinquish it. I was tired of the relentlessness of the city, long subway rides and rushed urban walks and crowded green spaces.

My mom came and helped me find a place to live in Bronxville, a spacious condo surrounded by trees and blue sky. I visited the campus and sat with the woman who would become my thesis advisor. She knew I was nervous, out of my element. “There is a waiting list of people who want to be here,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t good enough.”

The two years I spent in my MFA program were the two best academic years of my life. I cherish every moment I spent on that campus, but I only ended up there because Brooklyn Writers helped my find, not only my voice, but myself.

Brooklyn Writers was the lifeline that eventually pulled me out of that unhappy relationship and helped me bring myself into focus. In so many ways, I know who I am right now in my life because of the gathering of that writer’s group all those years ago.

And it was a sign that led me there.

A literal sign, copied at Kinko’s and stapled to a telephone pole, yes, but also a figurative sign. A spiritual sign. I was guided to that flier on Seventh Avenue, I felt it in my whole body. I could not escape its gravitational pull.

I can’t tell you who or what was doing the guiding. I have no idea how this universe works, I only know that I will never forget standing there in front of that phone pole reading those words, tearing off the phone number, making that call as if my life depended on it.