The rubble left behind. The pile of rocks is where I used to live. Photo by Sandra Lee Schubert © All Rights Reserved, 2014I have been thinking a lot about identity. What defines a person? Is it our DNA, where we grew up, or is it the family we are born into?
I have written about growing up in Astoria. The rats bigger then cats, the major heroin ring run from a local diner, the porn ring exposed across the street. A Satanist lived upstairs for a bit and a minor league drug dealer lived next door. The local chicken joint was in trouble for using the more voluptuous river rats instead of fowl for deep fry. I was surrounded by factories and lower and middle class families. The apartment building where I grow up was already a hundred years old. It was one of the first apartment buildings built with gardens in the back. Originally it had gas lighting and no bathrooms. The bathrooms were added later and formed columns in the back of the building. There was no insulation to speak of and winters we chipped the ice from inside our windows. In some ways it was like living in the Wild West; rough and untamed. But it also was the place where I grew up. Behind the yards there used to be stables that my father worked in as a boy. Later he would plant a tree there just outside set into the sidewalk was a horseshoe marking the spot
A couple of weeks ago I brought my niece to see the building where her mother and aunt had grown up. Patrick Hammer was there too. He had wanted to see the river rats I written about in the Wild Angels classes. I had heard rumors the place may have been torn down. My old apartment took an active place in my dream life. At times holding all the fear I felt there and other times the memories. Often I would dream of my mother, sick and frail and my first dog Bella, living there alone and forgotten in the back room. In the dream I would live near by and with horror realized I had left them alone. I found them OK but could never get over the horror of forgetting them. The dreams began to change and suddenly this dark and desolate place began to shift and I was living there again. The apartment now nice and livable and my mother and dog finally at rest as they should be. The dreams prepared me for the rumors but the reality did not. We came upon a desolate landscape bordered by plywood walls. Nothing remained of my former home except a couple of scattered rocks. Even the tree my father planted as a child was gone. Not a root was left for me to dig up and take home. We wandered down to the river just a couple blocks away where friends and I would sit on the abandoned docks watching the river rats play and the green and foamy water of the East River slap against the shore. Even here time had moved on and the old pilings mostly demolished to form instead a nice walkway. A park had been constructed and the dock where we sat held equipment. The old Steinway factory building was still there and the familiar factory buildings still dotted the landscape. The memories and stories so anchored to a place were now dug up and rearranged. The flattened landscape was like experiencing the death of my parents all over again. Soon something new will be built on the ruins and other people will come, live and dream and create new memories.
Who am I? Where does the story of who I am live? I thought it resided in the wood and stone of an old building. Now un-tethered I struggle a bit to find my bearings.
I am struck by the question of what is an identity. Who are we without the people, places and things that surround us? Does my name define me, the place I live or the family I come from? Does my country or the planet define me? Who does God say I am? Will that answer suffice when all around me seems changed? Here I am wobbly, questioning and unsure of my place in the world.
Sandra Lee Schubert © All Rights Reserved, 2006-2014
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