more pics of the hood

i'm genuinely too tired to write tonight, so this post will be a visual sampling of my neighborhood, in pics mostly taken the other night after i met Enamul and learned about his garden.

the spot at the left is VIM (an acronym i have yet to decipher), a clothing chain that sells trendy kicks (Nike, converse), jeans, & tops. if i decide to cave & buy a pair of skinnys i'm gonna look there first. and whenever i need a pair of tennies I know just where to go.

the building that houses this VIM is a former bank. etched in the stone façade above the big stars and stripes sign are the words "The People's Trust Company". around the corner, there's a mural and the name of a cafe which must have formerly inhabited the space.

wait - i said i was too tired to write, and i am. so i'm just gonna post pics from here on out. but before i do - check out that sunset. pretty lovely, huh? one of the advantages to living in Brooklyn - you get to see stuff like that.

ok. after uploading about 5 pics i can tell it's going to look too awkward to just do the cop-out photo collage. so instead, here are 2 more photos, one of the church next door to my apartment building, and one of the church across the street. (i live on a quiet block, except on saturdays and wednesday nights, and sometimes other times, when the attendees of the French Speaking Hebron Seventh Day Adventist Church next door (yes, that would be the one with the archway) make a whole lotta joyful noise with their singing, much of which is indeed in French due to the high Hatian population in the neighborhood (which is probably due to the presence of the French Speaking Hebron Seventh Day Adventist Church and its associated school up the street). Once I knew I'd be living on this block I researched the history of the Hebron Seventh Day Adventists - their founders were kind of an intense bipolar-sounding bunch, prone to investing great a deal of energy in second-coming predictions and then getting really bummed when they didn't come true. definitely worth a blog post of their own.

The Methodists who gather in the brick church are much quieter, or perhaps i just don't hear them because they aren't singing just a few yards away from my window. Since i'm named for the founder of Methodism, I feel like I should be more curious about them. But my main relationship with the place so far is one of deep gratitude for their fenced and gated but never locked grassy yard, one of the few patches of green between my apartment building and Brower Park, which is a good 5-minute walk away. Sometimes when it's raining, or really late, or the dog is really tired, or I am, I ask my great great grandfather, the Southern Methodist minister Jason Chrysostom Moser, if my dog, who spreads joy to so many just by being her good-natured self every day, is worthy to commune with the church's green pastures. If I clean up after her. Which I always do. 

So far, Jason Chrysostom always says it's ok.