Why Try and Change Now?

While I was growing up, autumn in my Brooklyn neighborhood felt like a rebirth.

Yes, the leaves were piling up and baseball season was over. But the neighborhood came alive again as everyone who had spent July and August on the Jersey shore returned for Labor Day. School started the next morning, bringing a fresh set of expectations.

I always wore my new clothes on the first day—stiff corduroy pants and a long-sleeve button-down. By lunchtime I’d be drenched in sweat; no one had bothered to tell the sun that summer was officially over.

I’m talking about middle school — by high school, that anticipation was gone. I’d walk to the corner of East 4th and Kings Highway to wait for the school bus with a handful of neighborhood kids. The only one who truly mattered was Eve—a dark-haired girl with blue eyes so striking they made me say nonsensical things and feel instant regret. Whenever Eve was around, I’d turn hyper, desperate to be the funniest person in her line of sight.

On freezing mornings, we’d cluster outside the local Laundromat, standing right over the sidewalk vent where blasts of warm air shot out. Kings Highway was my domain. A Carvel ice cream shop anchored the corner of East 3rd. Most storefronts were kosher—a falafel spot next to the Carvel, and a row of Middle Eastern grocers across the street. My parents ran a travel agency flanked by a Metropolitan Life building, a wedding photographer, a kosher delicatessen, and a furniture store.

Round the corner was the schoolyard where we played stickball, softball, and, come winter, touch football. Sometimes the local Italian boys would start trouble, assuming the Jewish kids would back down. We never did. There were days I’d put on my yarmulke purely to spite the guys yelling slurs from across East 2nd. I ended up with my share of bloody noses and bruised eyes, but it never deterred me. My mother taught me to be proud of who I was; I wasn’t about to yield to taunts. I didn’t usually wear my yarmulke, but I wore it when people told me I couldn’t. Fuck ’em.

In the classroom, I was the class clown—a role born at home trying to make my mother smile, then exported to school out of sheer boredom. The bus driver used to scream at us to sit down, but I always found myself standing up.

That pattern of non-conformity was never rooted in malice, but it led to far too many phone calls home, and later in life, too many meetings with Human Resources. Sit-down office work was never going to suit me. I’ve never been good at following rules, and I’ve paid the price in my career, but I simply never appreciated being told what to do, how to feel, or why.

I’m sixty now.

I can’t change myself and I don’t really want to. I have learned how to listen and pretend to care what others think or how they want me to be.

I’m from Brooklyn — mid-to-late-20th-century Brooklyn. Why try and change now?