The Romeo and Juliet of Brooklyn
We were Romeo and Juliet before we even knew who Romeo and Juliet were.
She had a balcony, and we talked about our lives.
Not bad for a couple of ten-year-old kids in Brooklyn.
Let me set the stage.
My family lived in my grandmother’s brownstone in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. My grandmother lived in the third-floor apartment. My mother and father, my sister and brother, and I lived on the bottom two floors.
All the brownstones on the street opened up to a common alleyway where our parents parked their cars and the kids played.
So for a ten-year-old, the alleyway was my world.
And soon my young world was about to change.
One day, as I played in the alleyway, I noticed a girl, about my age, looking out the second-floor window of a neighbor’s brownstone. She did not live there. I never once saw her play in the alleyway. I don’t remember now who she was (I was ten, and I’m surprised I even remember Brooklyn), but she was probably the granddaughter of the woman who lived there, most likely visiting for a few weeks in the summer.
Our alleyway was just shy of a quarter mile, and opposite the brownstones was a cement bench that ran that length.
Each day, while Juliet sat at the window, I was on the cement bench, and we talked.
I couldn’t tell you what we talked about, but it was my first true interaction with a girl who was not my sister or my cousins.
This went on every day, until it didn’t.
One day, I looked up at the window, and she wasn’t there.
Apparently, she went back to wherever she had come from.
The feelings I felt when I no longer saw her in the window were new to me.
In hindsight, she was my first romantic encounter.
My first love.
Now she was off somewhere else, sitting in another window, another balcony, asking:
“Romeo, Romeo, where art thou Romeo?”
Brooklyn.
