by Charles Troob
Dear Diary,
The optometrist who gave me eyeglasses as a little boy was chatty and warm, a real New York character. I stayed with him as an adult. When he finally retired, I switched to the pleasant doctor who bought his practice. So I still travel a few times a year to the neighborhood of my childhood, on the border between Forest Hills and Kew Gardens.
Last May, I went to a grocery-café on Queens Boulevard near 77th Avenue. I ordered a panino from the owner, a recent immigrant from Genoa. I startled her—both of us, really—by telling her that I’d grown up on that very block. I took my sandwich to a table by the window and gazed across the wide boulevard. In the 1950s my older brother and I would buy stamps on the far side, in a shop on the ground floor of an apartment house. The buildings of that era are still there, looking just the same except for the storefronts.
After my eye exam I went down into the subway. The Union Turnpike station is also little changed in more than half a century. I inhaled the familiar damp funk, and suddenly I was five years old once again, holding my mother’s hand as we awaited the E train, to visit my grandparents, two stops away in Jamaica….
Then I took an E train in the opposite direction, to Manhattan and 2023.