Brooklyn and whiplash

My youngest niece here in the city will be moving into her own apartment in Brooklyn at the end of the month. Her current roommate's international work visa will not be renewed, and so the roommate will have to leave her tech job and the country to return home. My niece got approved for a place in a walk-up yesterday, and the apartment itself is a gem, perfect for a twenty-something, computer-coding brainiac. It's also fairly near to where my daughter and her husband live, so that's good. But it's on a busy main drag, and the outside of the building is in dire need of a paint job. It's also above a dingy looking hardware store with a rusty yellowing sign, making the building entry to one side look like a dark hole in the picture on google maps. Plus there's construction across the street, all of it making the block look like it might be not quite ideal for a young woman on her own in the big city, especially one who, depending on the light, can look like she's maybe fourteen years old.

On FaceTime, my daughter helped me put things in perspective just now. "Ma, I walk down that block all the time," she said, "and it's fine. Nice older ladies are out walking their dogs and young couples are pushing baby strollers and fitness girlies are heading home from the gym at all hours. And do you see that luxury building going up across the street? Do you think they're putting that up on a block that's iffy? Plus living above a hardware store will be clutch. I promise you, your niece will be much safer than you were living one door over from drug dealers when you were her age, and you didn't give one thought to your safety then, so stop worrying. Besides, the neighborhood she's moving to is safer than where she is now. Your darling niece will be fine." 

My girl then "walked" me around on google maps and pointed out a couple of sidewalk eating places on the next block, and some other useful looking shops, so trusting in my daughter's assessment, I went ahead and texted my niece congratulations on finding a super cute place, as I sensed that my reserve was making her anxious. This one and I are alike in that way, we both know it. Update: She signed the lease.

The photo is one my niece took of another house in Brooklyn. I just like the sunshine yellow of the bay window. We were all hanging out in my daughter's back yard yesterday. We had gathered for brunch with our friend Brooke, who was leaving to fly back to Boston later. My girl and her love really lucked out with that outdoor space in the city. Can you believe I didn't take a single picture? My son would call that progress.

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On Sunday, as I was traveling home from Brooklyn, talking on the phone to my friend Elizabeth in LA, thousands of national guardsmen were being deployed there, because of protests against migrants being rounded up at their workplaces and herded into unmarked vehicles by plain clothes men in masks, claiming to have the authority to take them. Make no mistake, these deployments are already scaling up in a neighborhood near you. If you live in blue state anyway. Still, what happened in LA this weekend is what you would call an escalation. As Elizabeth said, if these immigrants are such a drain on society, why do they have to go to workplaces and schoolrooms to find them?  At least we got jerked out of the natural human tendency to mute the insanity happening in the world at large and fall back into our daily stupor. Hard to do that with this crew, though. Continuous whiplash is more their style.

This post, man. It has such a deceptive quality of life just going on, of people renting new apartments like it's just the regular everyday. We gloss over the fact that the necessity arose because her bright and credentialed roommate's work visa was cancelled, despite all she has to offer and has already given. Okay, no wringing of hands here. She'll have a perfectly good life back home. But then there's also the terrifying spectacle of thousands of armed military on the streets of LA, tear gassing minuscule crowds, a mere eighty people or so, no violence unless there's a ringer in the mix, which we know happens.

In happier news, my daughter just texted that she and her love are going to start fostering dogs again. They get their first pup this weekend. She's hella excited, which makes me so happy. They lost their dog Munch last year, just before their wedding, and their heartbreak was profound. I feel like their readiness to let dogs back into their home is another step in their healing.