Our latest trip to New York was as impromptu as anything in our lives can be, given the constraints of the calendar and the increasing complexity of our corporeal maintenance.   HL and I contrived to spend a week in our native city between the end of Passover and a series of familial events in May.  It was thanks to a dear friend's kindness that we could lodge in one of the most desirable areas of Manhattan, in quarters as comfortable as they were convenient.  I am grateful not only for the unflagging generosity of our host, but also for my continued ability to climb stairs, as the ascent to our borrowed flat could not be made any other way.

This staircase was the first part of our Manhattan fitness circuit. 

There are numerous purveyors of desserts and all types of food in Chelsea.

           We had arranged to meet friends in Brooklyn on the day after our arrival, on what turned out to be the beginning of a brief but record-breaking heat wave.  Our rendezvous was to be at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  As both HL and I had spent our earliest years in the section now designated Clinton Hill, we retained fond if hazy memories of the nearby parkland.   Often, while in New York, HL and I would muse about going back to our first addresses, mere blocks apart, but never managed to do so.   Clinton Hill is about a mile from the Botanic Garden, so we decided that there would be time before the midday rendezvous for us to find the apartment house on Washington Avenue that I had not seen since I was seven years old.  

        The Sun was directly overhead as we walked from the subway stop,  and we were quite overheated when I spotted the dark brown brickwork of my first dwelling.  The apartment house was much as I had remembered it, only cleaner, restored to its pre-war elegance.  It faced a row of brownstones that I recognized at once.  These, too, bore evidence of meticulous restoration.  I had witnessed neither the old neighborhood's protracted decline nor its subsequent gentrification.  Now it has become fashionable again, as has most of Brooklyn, a destination rather than a place to flee in pursuit of greater glamour.  

Soon after my birth, my parents brought me home to a fourth-floor apartment in this six-story building on Washington Avenue.

These days, the ownership of a property in Clinton Hill is emblematic of prosperity.