Please Don’t Lick the Taxi

My son is a Brooklyn native. My partner (known as Jer-bear for the purposes of this blog) and I have been living here longer than he has, but he’s still the native Brooklynite. But most of Boo Boo’s first three months of life were spent at my mom’s house in Kansas City, where, full disclosure, I am a native.

Boo Boo’s first weeks were spent cooped up in our apartment waiting out a series of bomb cyclones and blizzards, or waiting for the train or the bus when the weather permitted excursions, and waiting for Boo Boo to fall asleep no matter the temperature. Our apartment is small, which means it’s normal for Brooklyn, and it gets smaller when you don’t know the next time you’ll be able to step outside.

My mom lives in a house. She has a couch the size of a yacht that can fit the entire family, which is to say she has a normal sized couch, which is not normal here. She has a washer and a drier. And a dishwasher! And a yard and a veranda. And a kitchen and dining room and living room that are all separate rooms!

Kansas City is vibrant, but in a quaint, understated way that does not need stay up past midnight, but definitely can. And everything is so easy. Everything we needed was a twenty minute drive from my mom’s house, tops. If you had to take the bus, it was 45 minutes. And while everyone has a car, you don’t need one to get around my mom’s neighborhood. There are cafes, restaurants, and grocery stores and mom-and-pop shops just a half a mile from her house, including the toy store I went to as a kid, the barber shop where my dad went to for decades, the 99 cent store I worked at when I was in high school, and the Italian sandwich joint I went to on my lunch breaks.

We woke up to Boo Boo’s wails, but also to mourning doves, cardinals and bird chatter. We were there from mid-February to mid-April and sometimes it was nice enough to sit on the veranda and smell the soil and photosynthesis as the sun rose. We looked up and saw the sky and the trees. The same trees I saw as a child. Nights would find us gathered on my mom’s couch–me, my mom, Jer-Bear, Boo Boo and my mom’s cat, watching British murder mysteries. I tell you, it does not get any cozier than that, unless you’re watching The Great British Bake Off.

Also, most importantly my mom’s house has my mom.

I always thought that Kansas City was a great place to be a kid, but now I realize it’s also a great place to be a parent. Could we have stayed there indefinitely? We were not able to find out. We left in mid-April, when Boo Boo was around fourteen weeks old. New York was grey, the color of regret. We got into a cab to head back to Brooklyn. Jer-bear took care of the luggage and I strapped in Boo Boo and his car seat. Boo Boo had discovered his hands in Kansas City, and hadn’t stopped using them since. His hands, attached to arms that were now like chunky sausages, flapping around aimlessly, like seaweed tossed about by gentle waters. I paid them no mind, other than to adore them, as I pulled out the seat belt, wove it through the car seat and clicked the buckle in place before tightening it. I looked at Boo Boo to make sure his little hands weren’t directly under the webbing before I tightened it.

They were not. Instead, they were grasping it, and trying their mightiest to bring the webbing to his mouth, where his eager little tongue was sticking out, ready to receive the sacrament of the seat belt. My only hope that not very many people had used that car, which looked at least ten years old, and that everyone who did had washed their hands after using the bathroom, and that no one had ever had sex here, or had a recent coughing fit, or spilled traces of fentanyl, or had a baby that also licked taxis, and if there were taxi-licking babies involved, I had to hope they did not have hand, foot and mouth disease.

I quickly put Boo Boo’s binky in his mouth and held his hand as we started moving. But not too fast. We were stuck in traffic. 

Why are you even here? The City seemed to be asking me.

I don’t fucking know, I replied.

But I am here. I’ve been here for over twelve years. Does that make me a New Yorker? I don’t know. But for now I’m raising my baby here, a place where babies seem wildly out of place.

The second morning back in Brooklyn Jer-Bear was gone, away for work. It was just me and Boo Boo. I did not hear mourning doves. I heard the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I could not step outside with my dewy-skinned baby into dewy morning grass in my bathrobe and bare feet. We are more likely to step in dog shit than grass. I thought hard about going back to Kansas City that morning, after hearing at least twenty cars honking at each other.

But I didn’t. And we have found ways for Boo Boo to be barefoot. He gets to be barefoot in the stroller in the summer. He enjoys how his feet dangle off the edge of his seat, and he can kick them. They are luscious, succulent squishy things, with the tips of his toes tinted pink, like cherry blossoms. They hover over a sidewalk mottled with filth-blackened gum, embellished with trash, and marinating in the excrement and piss of cats, dogs and sometimes humans.

When I was a kid on summer nights we’d fall asleep to the sounds of cicadas and crickets. Their song was so thick you could lay your head on it. Boo Boo falls asleep on the subway, which makes a sound probably not unlike a rhinoceros charging at you. A steel rhinoceros.

Oh, and we live in a fourth floor walk-up.

There is no greater juxtaposition than the fresh pureness of a baby and the cement, grime and grittiness of New York City. Boo Boo belongs on a bed of moss, bathing in a gently gurgling spring and sleeping in a meadow of wildflowers or sitting in a fresh spring with songbirds singing in his ear, not pigeons that might poop on his head.

But in the fourteen months since my baby has been born, I’ve stopped asking if this is the best place to be, simply because this is the place we’re at right now. And while there is much to gripe about there are so many great things about New York City, not necessarily because of the city itself, but because of everyone else trying to make it the best place instead of figuring out if it already is the best place.