On Making Community Wherever You Find Yourself
Written by David Pozo
The Q18 bus used to stop just down the block from the 61st St-Woodside 7-train, and then go all the way up 69th Street to Grand Avenue. My grandparents’ house was on that bus route. For awhile, the Google Street View image of their beige brick three-story walk-up was coyly blocked by one of those very buses; stopped directly in front of their driveway at the exact right time, so the camera only snapped a shot of whatever mid-2000s ad was emblazoned upon the left side of the bus. Probably pharmaceuticals.
There was a potent sense of irony in the fact that, during the one moment my grandparents’ house was eligible for digital preservation, bound for immortalization on the cloud servers of the world’s most ubiquitous tech company, a bus decided to stop in front of it. This filled us all with a sense of pique (very Catholic, in hindsight), that we had been singled out for sacrifice or suffering.
For you see, the Q18 bus is – by my family’s estimation – the single most unreliable form of public transportation in the five boroughs of New York City.
It follows no schedule and heeds no timetable. Its god is chaos, its whims are sadistic. It arrives in the midst of a snowstorm when the driveway hasn’t yet been shoveled, and so just skips the stop in front of my grandparents’ house entirely. It randomly stops halfway down the street instead of at the assigned stop, and then speeds away too fast to catch. You’d be waiting for it for twenty minutes and then, when you finally give up and go back inside, it would come, laughing black fumes visible even through the thick-woven screen door as you race back outside to get on board. That sort of thing.
These rules apply at all points along its route, including back at the 7-train stop where we would pick it up when we were coming back to Queens, the world’s greatest outer borough, after a sojourn into the concrete purgatory of Manhattan.
Brooklyn is still Kings county in all the legal records. I used to think (and probably still do), that New York is like chess. The King gets the crown, but the Queen has the power. At the very least, the food is better.
Anyway, the reason I’m talking about bus routes is that my grandparents’ house was only about two blocks away from ours. When I say ours, I mean mine and my mother’s and father’s and for approximately seven months, my little sister’s too, before we left Queens for the fields of Elysium (Northern New Jersey). If one could actually manage to catch the Q18 bus, it would leave one not only at the doorstep of my grandparents’ house, but also a three minute walk away from ours.
This was our community. This was our world.
For many reasons, this is no longer my community. This is no longer my world.
This isn’t because I moved to Vermont with my partner about five years ago. No, that little corner of Maspeth, Queens had stopped being my community years before, when my father’s side of the family vanished for reasons not germane to this piece. So losing the other community I had back in the greater New York area – my mother’s family – shouldn’t have been too difficult. After all, I had already gone through it.
But something about moving to Vermont was different. It was voluntary, exciting, willful. Saying goodbye to that familial community was a choice made out of love and partnership, not one foisted upon me by circumstances of tragedy.
My own childhood and that of my sister were textbook manifestations of “it takes a village.” Not only did we live down the block from the aforementioned grandparents’ house, but my mother’s side of the family was a short hop away, on the other side of the Hudson, in North Jersey. My aunt’s sons – my cousins – were all but brothers to me growing up. My abuela (my mother’s mother), despite not speaking English and despite our not speaking much Spanish, watched my little sister and I in the evenings while we waited for my parents to get back from work. I remember asking her to make me popcorn. We made it work.
Summers were family parties at my aunt’s house. Heineken for the adults, cold sodas for the kids. Burgers off the grill. Arroz con pollo, buffet-style.
Winters were holidays at my abuela’s. Ceviche and ham. Turkey y plátanos.
Springs were birthday gatherings around my mother’s family. Cuban and Italian restaurants. Trips back into the city. Adults drinking upstairs while the tweens played video games in the basement.
This was an early-2000s cultural collision at top speed. My cousins and sister and I, children of immigrants who came here back when the promise of a utopic America was almost believable (at least based on what they saw on the news), coming face-to-face with needless war (isn’t it always?) and recession and the cold reality of living in the heart of an empire too vast to know it was dying from the inside out.
I was not raised by a “nuclear” family. Surrounding me were a pastiche of cultures and languages, traditions and familial folklore. Names and faces of second and third cousins whose stories poured out of my aunts and uncles and parents as smoothly as cooking oil, but to me felt further away than the distant shores of homelands I have still never seen.
It is impossible to overstate the normalcy of immigrants in the New York City metropolitan area raising their children in a vast village, even if that village is scattered across multiple apartments and houses – some two bridges and a tunnel apart from each other. How could it not be normal? They all come here together, by plane and by ship, often with little more than a green card and a prayer (spun determinedly around a rosary, of course), and they can’t imagine disseminating further. No windborne seeds amongst them, no, they cluster; heavy dense nuts dropped from the boughs of a mighty tree.
Except me. I moved away.
My partner’s family has roots venerable and strong throughout New England, but home for her is Vermont. She left that home for school, and that is where we met. For ten years, it was she who left the community who raised her, to kick it in Brooklyn with the loveably foolish dipsomaniacs who thought by virtue of something as mundane as geography they could boast living in the center of the world. She came to all those family gatherings of mine, of course, maybe twice as often as we were able to make it back North to hers.
When it came time to put down roots, it didn’t seem fair to stay amidst the concrete and the brownstone, the jolts of the PATH train, the acceleration, the rush and the roaring. We headed instead North, to pastures green and air clean.
Now I have a daughter of my own. Being her father is the great joy of my life. We are beyond fortunate that she, too, will be raised by a community. Not wholly of blood, but of family nonetheless, in as much of a village as I myself was raised in. She will be reared, and taught, and loved, by a whole circus troupe of caretakers who would live and die for her.
But it won’t be the same one that lived and died for me.
Did my grandparents feel this way when they left Ecuador, or Croatia, or Slovenia? That they were committing to raising their own eventual children far from the communities that raised them?
What is an immigrant if not someone who sacrifices the community at their side, good or bad, for the faint hope of a new one beyond their shores?
I had originally wanted to end this piece with some advice for building your own community, wherever you are. I offer a pittance in this regard, for “community” often finds us before we go looking for it. It is imperative to remember that community is not convenient, especially when you have travelled beyond kith and ken in search of a new one.
Look to your local library. Odds are they’re well-accustomed to caring for those for whom other comfort nets have failed.
Look to your local cafes and restaurants. Public houses are as old as civilization itself, and often no imbibing of substances is required. Mixers and special events give you an opportunity to break bread with new faces.
Look to your city halls, your courthouses and post offices. Believe it or not, people still use bulletin boards. Grab that flyer for a local game group, or book club, or open mic.
Look to your child caregivers, and the others who trust them. If you’re fortunate enough to have children in a childcare facility, speak to the parents there. There is little camaraderie quite like being in the midst of raising a little one.
Perhaps these suggestions are obvious, or unhelpful. If I were to distill it into something pithy, I would say, focus on finding trust. That can take many forms, and doubtlessly will take much time. It won’t be effortless, like family (although anyone with a family will probably scoff at my using the word ‘effortless’ in reference to having one, but you get my drift). But when it works, it will feel as safe as houses.
Back in Queens, I was so comfortable in my ken, I never thought about the Q18 bus as anything more than a vehicle to get me from A (the danger of not home) to B (home). I had the assurance of community at hand already. I was deep in the circle.
Now, many years later, I wonder – if I had just looked up from my book, or taken out my headphones, turned to the rider next to me, and said, “Hey, this bus sucks, doesn’t it?” – would I have made that circle a little wider?
