Poking My Head Out

At the urging of my husband, I attended the Brooklyn Blogade last Sunday. It was a lovely event, which has already been documented by other, more on-top-of-things bloggers. Our hostess Joyce, of Bad Girl Blog, wrote about it, Flatbush Gardener took pictures, and there's even more at the Luna Park Gazette, A Year in Prospect Park, Brooklynometry, Shellytown, and Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn. The amount of talent in the room was inspiring, and everyone was so gosh-darn nice that it made me feel really good about the world and wonder why I don't make an attempt to connect with other people more often. I suppose I'm always afraid that poking my head up out of its hole will result in having it bitten off, but this was a nice reminder that it is not always so.

I thoroughly enjoyed everyone's contributions, but I have to especially mention Rob's piece, because it was so moving and beautiful. It made me tear up. Maybe because my father is so frail, and our relationship so fraught, stories about parents really strike a nerve with me. As I was blinking away tears, I fervently hoped that I wouldn't be called on next, because after something so heartfelt and touching, does one really want to read one's whacked-out story about a guy rolling around in shit? No, one does not. I breathed a sigh of relief when David was called, but then he had a little trouble setting up his laptop, and as luck would have it, I was summoned. Thankfully, the mood had lightened during the technical difficulties interlude, and my reading went over okay.

Then last night, we were in Park Slope to take the girls to the doctor, and when we popped into the frozen yogurt shop around the corner for the obligatory post-doctor-visit treat, we ran into Louise, of OTBKB fame. When we first moved here, I kept joking that every time I left the apartment, I saw one of the six people we knew, and it still seems to be true. As soon as we meet someone, we start running into them everywhere. How does this happen in a city of eight million people? I suppose it's because we all mostly stick to our little enclaves. It's funny to think that if we'd moved to Inwood or Queens instead of Brooklyn, we'd be living a completely different life right now. I didn't realize until I got here how much the neighborhood in which you live defines your entire existence.

In any case, I was happy to see Louise again, and to introduce her to my family, and then this morning when I saw that she'd blogged about our encounter, it gave me a small thrill, because I'm kind of a nerd and I get excited whenever I get a little recognition. That MSNBC interview was over a year ago, after all. (I almost linked to it, but then I foresaw the heat I might take for doing such a thing, being that the non-profit organization I volunteer with would probably not want to be associated with this blog. Hmph. I can't even flaunt my 15 minutes of fame - oh, well.)

So thanks again to Joyce, and to all the wonderful Blogade bloggers. It was truly a delightful afternoon!