Relay: Circles In Circles
“Christopher Walsh celebrated his eighth birthday with a party on Saturday at his Cleveland Road home.”
It’s right there in the Sept. 13, 1973, issue of The Star, there in the Montauk notes. You can look it up.
In truth, it was my seventh birthday, and I lived on Hudson Road, just off Cleveland. Nonetheless, I was thrilled to see my name in the newspaper. Imagine my delight, almost 40 years and a thousand or so bylines later, to see it in The Star again, this time as a reporter.
Recently, I found the website of Mitchell’s NY, a company that delivers The Star to subscribers in New York City, after I deliver it there on Thursdays. A name on the contact page struck me, a man named Alan. He had the same name as my best friend at the Acorn School, a neighborhood preschool that I attended at age 4, and maybe 3 as well, when it was on East 20th Street in Manhattan.
It’s a long time ago, but I retain some memories: Alan and I laughing hysterically as we walked to school, my mother a few steps behind. Alan and I playing in the classroom, and in the enclosed playground as mothers gathered beyond the wall, awaiting our dismissal. Miss Cook, the teacher, and her assistant, whose name now escapes me. Twin girls (I think) named Payton and Paxton (I think). A boy who could run very fast, always first to the toys and art supplies.
A couple of weeks ago, Mitchell’s relocated to a nearby facility in Long Island City, and I was having a miserable time finding it. I drove to the old place and was given directions to the new one. But I just can’t figure out Queens.
Fortunately, my cellphone rang. “Hi, Christopher? This is Alan from Mitchell’s.” He gave me directions, and when I still couldn’t find the place and called him back, he suggested we meet at the old facility, where I could then follow him to the new one.
Back on 32nd Place, Alan stepped out of his car and I was pretty sure it was him. Once at the new facility, he helped me unload the newspapers. “I have to ask you something kind of crazy,” I said. “Are you from New York?”
“I’m from Manhattan,” he said.
“Did you go to the Acorn School?” Alan looked at me as though I were a sorcerer. “You’re scaring me,” he said. “We were best friends,” I said.
Alas, Alan had no recollection of me. But I understand — it had been 43 years, after all, and in my experience most people have little or no recall from that age. I’m kind of a freak about memory.
In the evening, Cathy and I had dinner at Surf Bar in Williamsburg, a restaurant in which surfboards are prominent, clam chowder is plentiful, and the floors are covered with sand. Something like 14 years ago, my friend Larry and I went to the Surf Bar’s progenitor, which I think was called Hurricane Hopeful, a couple of blocks to the east. Hurricane Hopeful was a tiny storefront, an urban chowder shack serving little else but beer. Larry, a surfer who had also grown up in Montauk, and I struck up a conversation with the proprietor, who as I remember it told us that the place was inspired by Ditch Plain, where he used to surf.
Around the time of that birthday note in The Star, I used to go to the beach at Ditch Plain, when not at the ocean at the bottom of Cleveland Road. I haven’t been there in a long time, but on Labor Day I drove home from the office and biked to Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett. It was after 5 and people were beginning to trudge through the sand to the parking lot, perhaps for the last time, as, immersed in the rejuvenating sea, a familiar jumble of gratitude and melancholy washed over me. Summer is over, I’m another year older.
Lying on the sand, the waves rolled in, one after another after another, and I was back in my bed on Hudson Road, listening to far-off waves through open windows as I drifted into blissful slumber on breezy, long-ago summer nights.
Another byline for Christopher Walsh, who is a reporter at The Star.