Lost Englander Family Enclave Disacovered on Avenue J!

This past weekend I found out there is a branch of my family that I have been completely unaware of. None of my other relatives knew about them either. At least none of my relatives who still speak to me, which kind of limits the sampling, but hey, you work with what you got, right? Anyway, this new bunch seemed to be living in what might be called a tight knit enclave. Actually I’d call it virtual isolation, cut off completely from – and pissed of at - the rest of the world and I only found them on account of I accidently got off the Q Train at Avenue J*.

These folks have lived out of touch for so long that about the only thing we have in common these days is our family name and an aversion to buying retail. Well that and a mistrust of anything painted dayglo, people named Corky and anything freez dried and imported from Parague. I also found some scary indication that they have cultivated a genetic mutation resulting in the development of a fully functioning third leg.

While some of the local foods were vaguely familiar, the results of generations of gastronomic isolation were obvious and in some cases, downright disgusting:

They also have a fear of being photographed and ran and hid when they say my camera, so I did not get any shots of them.  No great loss since most looked like the people in my Bar Mitzva album.  Except for that third leg. But I did have a not-too-bad kasha knish before I got back on the Q train, so the day wasn’t a total loss.
                                
*Note: Nobody quite understands the history or nomenclature of Brooklyn street names due to the fact that there were no written records before 1932. It has been speculated that somewhere in the dim past, the City Fathers of Brooklyn – then a separate city – in a fit of grandiose self deception, designated half the streets in the borough as “avenues.” After naming a few of these avenues for each other they ran out of street names. And ideas. In a move that would embarrass countless generations, they named the rest of the streets with letters of the alphabet. Originality was never a strong point of the borough. Regardless of just how it happened, one positive result is that it does make it easier to navigate some of the Brooklyn’s back streets. Walk a block from Avenue J and you come to Avenue K. And then there’s Avenue L and then……..

Anyway, in time literacy spread through most of Brooklyn’s communities as children walked around, looked at street signs and learned to read them. Kids in the rest of the City just went to school.

As to the “Q” train: it seems that many members of the MTA (a polite designation for the misbegotten bureaucrats who pretend to run the subway system) are Brooklynites and still only superficially literate. While subway trains originally had grand names, these yahoos have, in that same Brooklyn tradition,  reduced them to single letters and numbers. Hence today we have gone from calling  “The Lexington Avenue Express” to calling it the “#4” train. And the “Sea Beach Line” is now reduced to being called "Q." Progress, Brooklyn style. Don't blame my relatives. They had nothing to do with it. 


This note from an old friend: The Sea Beach Line is the N train. The Q, I believe, is the old Brighton Line. Similarly, the West End Line became the B, the Culver Line, the F and the 4th Avenue Local, the R.


Now let’s talk about the first 2 numbers of a telephone numbers. We used to be an Esplanade 6, now a 376; my grandparents a Dewey 9, now a 339, my aunt a Nightingale 5, now a 645. I think my number was a Gramercy 5, now 475. Such a shame that these were changed too.

..............everybody's a critic!!