Tag Archives: Park Slope

Scenes from Park Slope

They attend their first summer concert in Prospect Park. They’re smug about already possessing the yuppie picnic essentials: blanket, cooler, baguette, rosé, lawn sports. But she doesn’t remember that she packed her paddle ball set until the concert is over and dark has descended on the Brooklyn leisure class. No matter. She’s determined to play anyway. “But you won’t be able to see the ball,” says her companion. “Of course I will,” she says. They take to their feet with their paddles. He hits the ball, which is dark blue. She swats toward where the ball might be. The ball lands in the grass and disappears forever. “Told you so,” says her companion. Nearby picnickers catch her attention. They are playing the Italian game of bocce with glow-in-the-dark balls. It’s as if these picnickers came to the park just to taunt her with their lawn sport superiority. She realizes that she now lives in a world where owning a paddle ball set is not enough to illustrate her status as a Park Slope elite. She must now acquire a paddle ball set that glows. A paddle ball set that overcomes the natural limits imposed by night and day, good and evil, pinot noir and rosé. She must own a paddle ball set that makes a mockery of the seasons and rejects the rotation of the earth. She will paddle at midnight, in winter, underwater. Suddenly the Cheeto stains on her picnic blanket seem all the more glaring.

“Yes,” says the bagel shop owner, “we do sell gluten-free bagels.”

She feels that people take her career more seriously now that she lives in Park Slope. Professional writers abound in her zip code. There are few public benches in her neighborhood not occupied by middle-aged men with MacBooks in their laps, staring at her as she passes, willing her to do something story-worthy. (She never does.) A new acquaintance who might have considered her a hack when she lived in Bed-Stuy, now thinks she’s Margaret Atwood by virtue of her new address. “So tell me about your craft,” he says. “Like, what is your typical morning like?” “Well,” she says, “I wake up, make some coffee, then surf the internet for an hour or three.” “God,” he says, “it’s so fascinating what you do.” She badly wants to prove herself worthy of his delirious respect while she answers his questions about word count and creative process, but she’s not used to being treated like a professional and it makes her self-conscious. She wonders how long it will take her to start identifying as a Park Slope Writer and not a Murder Avenue, basement-dwelling amateur. For now, however, she can only enumerate her bathroom breaks to her number one fan while secretly battling a sea of cognitive dissonance.

On their way to pick up a beautiful, like-new, 8 x 10 rug that retails for $1,500 but one of their Park Slope neighbors is giving away for free, they pass an espresso machine on the sidewalk. Upon scoring the rug, an additional dutch oven from Le Creuset, and a set of twins, an espresso machine is the only thing they need to complete their transformation into average citizens of Park Slope. So she puts the freebie machine into her canvas tote bag and starts fantasizing about iced lattes. Once they’ve collected their rug, they take a different route home to see if they might dumpster-dive some other brownstones. Sure enough, they find a stack of unopened cardboard boxes on the pavement next to a manicured shade tree. The boxes contain pristine cans of illy Italian gourmet espresso with a combined street value of about $300. She is surprised not to encounter a windfall of soy milk in the final blocks home. Maybe tomorrow.

“Yes,” says the girl behind the counter, “of course we serve vegan gelato.”