The Old Neighborhood

I grew up in Tarrytown New York and lived there until I was twenty-three. Our family home was an apartment in a complex on Tappan Landing Road that was built shortly after WWII. My father was born in Tarrytown, and it was here that my parents settled when they married in 1955. After my mother’s death in 2001, it struck me that she had lived in the same neighborhood for over forty years. She knew all her neighbors and they knew her. Of course there were newcomers to the neighborhood, but it was a surprisingly stable community of neighbors who lived there, most of them older people, retired or like my mother, old-timers who had raised their children there and who stayed on as they watched their children grow up and leave.

My parents were on friendly terms with most of their neighbors. They were always willing to stop and chat briefly with the parents of our friends, who attended the same grammar school as we did. In that way, they shared their lives without becoming intimately involved. There were always borders that were not crossed—none of the neighbors as I remember ever invited the others to dinner or in for coffee. Or if it happened, it was very seldom. I do remember that the older women would sometimes sit out in the shade of one of the big trees on the front lawn and talk for a few hours during a summer afternoon, but that was also a seldom occurrence. Nevertheless, they were good to one another and supportive of each other in difficult times—sickness and death. When my father died in 1985, my mother’s neighbors made food for us and I will always remember their kindness. My mother, who loved the winter, was often out early to help the superintendent shovel the walkways and when she was done with that, she would clean off her elderly neighbor’s car. Sometimes she and another neighbor would go shopping together, and she and the same neighbor got their driver’s licenses together shortly after my father’s passing. They would visit sick neighbors in the hospital, and attend wakes and funerals for the same neighbors who passed on after one too many illnesses. They were charitable toward and respectful of one another and that was a valuable lesson in how to live life.

There were a lot of children in our neighborhood when we were growing up, and we hung out together. We played a lot of kickball and dodge ball, and did a lot of roller-skating, hurtling down the parking lot driveway at top speed and smashing into the garage doors at the end of the driveway. It surprises me now, thinking about it, that none of us ever really got injured (or that the garage doors never got damaged). We also hung out at each other’s houses, listening to rock music on WABC or WPLJ and talking. During summer vacation, after dinner, we would walk around the corner to Henrik Lane to hang out with friends who lived there. Sometimes we would walk to WI (Washington Irving junior high school) ball field and sit in the bleachers looking out over the Hudson River, and just talk. It was here that Tarrytowners would gather on July 4th in the evening to watch the fireworks that were sent up from barges on the river. The event was always crowded with people, and an orchestra would play until it got dark enough to send up the fireworks. They were always a spectacular sight and watching them together with family was always a special time. We also spent a good deal of time in the summer at Kingsland Point Park, which was a beach and picnic area on the Hudson River. And if we weren’t doing that, we were hanging around downtown, shopping at the local gift store, bookstore or clothing stores. We were also often at the movies at the Music Hall on Main Street.

I was restless when I was a teenager, as most teenagers are, and looked forward to leaving Tarrytown when I grew up. I wanted to leave because Tarrytown seemed too small to me when I was younger, and that meant lack of privacy. Everyone knew everyone else and everyone else’s business, or so it seemed. It was hard to be anything other than what people perceived you to be or assumed that you were from when you were a child. So if you were the smart one in the family, it felt as though you could not suddenly become an actress after years of talking to the neighbors about the biology courses you were taking. It wasn’t possible to ‘try on new selves’, if that makes any sense, without a whole lot of commenting and tongues wagging. Perhaps it is that way in most small towns. I wanted to immerse myself in the larger world. So I did leave Tarrytown after I finished college, trading it for the Bronx, thereafter New Jersey, Norway, California, and then Norway again. Throughout these moves and changes, my old neighborhood with my mother still living in it remained a point of stability on my mental map. I always knew she was there. The same phone number, the same street address--stability. I could pick up the telephone and dial her number, and she would always be there to answer it. While it seemed as though my life changed from year to year, hers remained fairly much the same. She seemed fine with that, never complaining, enjoying her daily routines of volunteering at the local library, walking to the store to buy groceries, chatting with her neighbors and going to mass. When we talked, she would fill me in on life in the neighborhood—who was doing what, whose daughter or son was getting married, who had become a grandparent, who had bought a house, who had graduated from college---and we would talk about now and the past and how things had changed. Her keeping me up-to-date kept me grounded and connected in a way that I never would have thought possible, and I am grateful for it, even though I didn’t appreciate it as much at the start. Her point of reference was always her children in relationship to the neighborhood families with their children.

That is what I miss, now that my parents and their neighbors are gone—most of them having passed on. The neighborhood as we knew it is gone. As long as our parents lived there, it was still our old neighborhood and we could always ‘go home’. I don’t really know anyone who lives there now. Yet an odd thing has happened, and that is that I now appreciate the smallness of Tarrytown. It is appealing to me now because of its smallness, because it is possible to get to know it due to its smallness. It is not overwhelming. Mostly, it is just a lovely town--a small quaint town on the Hudson River with a wonderful vibrant history, lovely estates, lakes, river parks and nature. I look forward to seeing it each year when I come to NY, because it has become my ‘hometown’ even though my old neighborhood is gone.