Ellen Meeropol

I love Brooklyn. I love the brownstones and the storefronts and the tiny gardens tucked between buildings. I love eavesdropping on conversations in languages I can’t identify. I love the mix of foods – Halal food trucks next to kosher butchers and Calexico beans and yuppie bistros – cuisine from every corner of the world.

Most of all, I love Brooklyn because my grandchildren live there. Last week, Robby and I were in Brooklyn, hanging out with Josie and Abel during school vacation week. We painted pottery and played Chutes & Ladders and Zingo. We colored and drew and drove trains around the living room floor. There were Shopkins and Lincoln Logs and Legos and extraordinary combinations of all the above. There were parks and playgrounds and Transit Museum; and I can’t leave out the delightful and overpriced (everything in Brooklyn is overpriced to this Easthampton wallet) Curiosity on Court, with climbing wall and playscape and subway station.

I also love Brooklyn because of the ghosts. My family ghosts. Both my parents lived in Brooklyn; they met at Brooklyn College. In the medium days of her Alzheimer’s, my mother used to ask me if I remember the apartment she lived in on Keap Street in Williamsburg, decades before my birth. At sixteen, my dad moved from Manhattan’s lower east side to Bensonhurst with his family; I remember visiting my grandparents in that house. My grandmother was short, and I loved that the kitchen sink was built low enough for me to wash dishes. The el was close-by and the corner store sold tasty penny candies.

Those two Brooklyns – of my parents’ youth and that of my grandchildren – exist many decades apart. But walking those streets last week with Josie and Abel, I felt the company of my family ghosts.  Read More 

In honor of book groups

For many passionate readers, book groups are our reading family. Like all families, there may be a few dud selections, the equivalent of the second cousin who spends holiday dinners staring at a screen, or the uncle who farts, but we still love them. I have two book group families. One group, which has been going for over a decade, is through a local indie bookstore. I love the fact that it’s open to anyone who has read the month’s book and wants to discuss it. I also love that about 1/3 of the time we invite the author to join us.

The other group, which we call Stones and Bones, started in 1994 as a group of friends, originally convened at the Odyssey Bookshop. We chose the name because we noticed how many books we discussed that first year or two had “stones” or “bones” in the title (Stones from the River, The Bone People, Stone Diaries.) Over the past 22 years, the group has lost and gained members and has moved from meeting at the bookstore to members’ homes, but continues to offer us an opportunity to read books we otherwise probably would not have chosen, and to enjoy the books a second time through discussion. Although most meetings involve sitting around someone’s living room talking about a novel, we’ve tried different bookish activities, ranging from weekends on Martha’s Vineyard (discussing novels set there, of course) to reading poetry to each other.

In honor of this group, and all book groups, I’d like to share our twenty-two years of literary selections.

1994
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
Indian Lawyer, James Welch
Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
The Bone People, Keri Hulme
A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez
Middlemarch, George Elliot  Read More