I Moved to Brooklyn the Other Day, Part One
This is the third installment of a guest blogging series by Shawna Stoltzfoos. Read her first and second entries here.
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It happened almost overnight. It took years. It was quick. It was eternal. It happened. It didn’t happen. It never stopped happening. It happened once but I forgot. It might happen.
When I was a child, I reasoned as a child. I picked out Blockbuster videos as a child. I stirred up shit at the local dive bar like a child. I ate grapes like a little asshole, complaining about the seeds and the peel and the color and the stem.
I grew older, and I grew older. I refined. I shut up about food and ate it. My feet drug along the concrete a little, smacked against the concrete a little.
Then I got younger again. The world is scary. I got a minor diagnosis and wept. I was told I was not talented and wept. I lost social battles and wept. The world is scary. I was seven again, and lost, and afraid, and always calling my mother.
I moved to Brooklyn the other day. I’ve made a list of all the reasons. When I’m old, they make me feel proud and brave. When I’m young, they make me sob with ineptitude. I call my mother.
Reason one: Because I wanted to. Proud, brave. Sob, inept.
I moved out of my minuscule apartment in Lancaster City, feeling young and scared, three feet tall, holding tight to the side seam of my mother’s jeans. I ripped my last name off the mailbox, and underneath, the name Harriet Beiler. My character in my indie mini-series that we filmed at my place. I feel old. Wise. Proud. Accomplished.
Time is an energetic old man who dances on your grave in a coconut bra.
I think about that poem ‘Courage’ by Anne Sexton. I think about the day when I will put on my carpet slippers and stride out. On days when I feel very old, I can almost feel them on my toes. When I’m young, I sit in the fetal position and stare at the slippers from across the room, murmuring to myself in code. Affirmations, I guess they’re called.
Young, or old, but rarely in between. Which is what I actually am. The first thing I put out in my Brooklyn apartment is a figurine of a young girl that my great-great-grandmother gave to me, before she died at 108 years old. I put it up high in my bedroom, so I can greet it with my chin in the air, boldly. The women in my family live a long time. I stick my arrogant face up to God and grin.
Lancaster was a fantastic place to be born, a fantastic place to have left as a young child, a fantastic place to have returned to as a young adult. I hold it in my jacket pocket like a shiny rock. “Stoltzfoos,” I say now like a stranger. New Yorkers look right through me. They don’t know about it.
I was sick for a month before I left. There was going to be a big party. I was going to tell everyone in town and let them hug me. Then I became very ill, and the party was cancelled before it was announced. I went unhugged, and quietly left, a real Irish exit. French exit? A real universally preferred exit. Everybody was left off the hook. I bowed out.
I’m young and I miss the library on Duke Street. I’m old and I miss the rainbow cakes on Duke Street. I’m young and I miss the man in the cowboy hat. I’m old and I miss the woman who was mean to me once. I’m still ill. I lay on my Brooklyn couch now. It’s all idiotic.
The old man in the coconut bra shakes his hips.
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Shawna Stoltzfoos is a writer, actor, and filmmaker, and the creator of the mini-series Young/Lancaster.
4 Comments
Katrina
March 21, 2016 1:38 pm
Wow! Shawna this was fantastic. Yeah, so much true in it. Glad to know you if just a bit. :)
Gerry
March 21, 2016 2:06 pm
You, lady, are a very odd, funny, and delightful person. And did I mention funny?
Sharon Lantz Shirk
March 21, 2016 3:48 pm
I’m so frustrated Shawna … That you moved and I didn’t even know! I’m bummed because you didn’t know that this whole time you were in Lancaster, I wanted to meet up and have a coffee together SOMETIME. How to s life like that’s? So fast and furious, full of SEASONS and CHANGE and then so slow and quiet like a long winter?
Please let me know next time you are in town, I still want to have a coffee with you and I hope it’s soon! Can’t let that go on, that you don’t know that I want to be with you and that we haven’t had a cup together in this time you were in Lancster!
Christopher Brooks
March 29, 2016 8:25 pm
We’ll miss you. Young/Lancaster was wonderful. I saw it a Zoetropolis.
I’m from Brooklyn. It’s a wonderful place. Make sure to get to the new park along the river.