The Intersection of Hope and Reality is Under Construction

The intersection just outside our Brooklyn apartment and the streets leading to it have been under construction for five years, which is a really long time to live next door to a construction site, it turns out. The pipes underground were 100 years old and needed to be replaced and then, during the excavation of the old pipes, a new issue or maybe several issues were discovered that needed to be addressed before the initial project could be completed. Various bureaucratic roadblocks (ha) prolonged this ordeal seemingly indefinitely, and now here we are five years later and it’s still a fucking mess outside. The most recent update I’ve heard is that the deadline to finish is end of June, so we will see, but experience has taught me not to be too optimistic.

At various points in the past five years, the project has been shut down for weeks if not months at a time, gaping holes left in the torn-up road, trees wrapped in protective gear, reflective orange barrels everywhere, and miscellaneous tools tempting little eyes. For months! Inevitably, during these time-outs, there are always a few posts that pop up on our neighborhood Facebook page asking if anyone knows what’s going on, if the work will resume, whether we will ever be on the other side of this. So many things over the past five years have made me wonder whether we will make it to the other side. I guess I must be more optimistic than I thought because I’ve been surprised the answer hasn’t been ‘yes’ more often.

Drew and I binged “Dying for Sex” a couple weeks ago, a series based on a true story about a woman on a sex quest as she dies of stage four cancer. This isn’t a spoiler I don’t think, but in one of the final episodes, a hospice nurse shared that her favorite stage of the dying process – she’s overly enthusiastic about death, even for a hospice nurse – is the “rally” stage – a burst of energy and euphoria shortly before death. Our cat, Miles, whose final 18 months of life felt a lot like hospice care, rallied a few days before he died. We didn’t know that’s what it was and we believed, instead, that a year and a half into this prolonged health decline and just shy of turning 18, he was suddenly and miraculously on the cusp of a full (or at least significant) recovery. We were wrong.

I’ve been thinking about the rally stage and how it might apply to other kinds of endings, not just people’s (or animals’) deaths. Like, all the tests my 8th grader has this month before he “moves up” to high school, or packing up and preparing a home to sell to its new owners, or, if my husband is right, the flurry of activity and sheer volume of noise and tumult on the intersection outside our home before the project’s completion at the end of the month. Drew says I can see with my own eyes that they’re winding down because the streets have been re-paved and they wouldn’t re-pave the streets if they weren’t done digging them up, and this is when I remember that I’m not that optimistic (though maybe Drew is?). Still, this is as close to an end as we’ve seen in five years, so here’s hoping this really is a rally before the finale.

Maybe the end of the street construction will coincide with Jackson’s eighth grade Moving Up ceremony in a few weeks, about which my mother, when I mentioned it to her on FaceTime the other day, said, “We didn’t do that when I was growing up! We didn’t have all these ceremonies! We had one graduation – your high school graduation, and that was it!” And it’s true, kids have all these ceremonies now that I don’t remember from my own childhood. Before they even start high school, they have moving up ceremonies for pre-k, kindergarten, fifth grade, and eighth grade, which I guess is a lot, but imagine being a kid these days. My daughter, Joanie, spent her entire kindergarten year on Zoom and Donald Trump has been the president or running for president for half her life. Give the kids all the ceremonies.

Honestly, I wish there were more of them. Not just for kids – for all of us, for all the stuff we make it through to the other side. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to wake up to construction right outside your house every day for five years and still manage to be friendly sometimes. I’d like a ceremony for that. Maybe a medal would be nice, or at least a commemorative t-shirt. “I Survived the Great Re-Piping of the 2020s and it Didn’t Make Me a Monster!”

Joanie was five when the construction started outside our apartment and in a few weeks she’ll turn ten. She doesn’t remember what our intersection – what our neighborhood – looked like before. Did it look pretty once? Was it pleasant strolling down the block without hopscotching around barricades and orange cones, without the drone of jackhammering as a constant soundtrack? She couldn’t tell you. She couldn’t tell you what life was like before the Trump era began either. She was born less than a year before he announced his candidacy for 2016.

When I’m feeling optimistic, I wonder if we’re nearing the end of the MAGA movement – if this flurry of horror since the inauguration is the movement’s rally before it dies. It’s possible, yes? I can almost hear my husband say, “You can see for yourself how they’re re-paving the roads.” I don’t know if that’s a sign the end is near, but I can tell you this: when it happens, however it happens, there will be ceremonies, there will be celebrations, I’ll make t-shirts that say we survived, that say we made it to the other side. Finally, we made it.