Last night, friends visiting, we went to dinner
in Hudson, home of William Kennedy’s Ironweed
novels about the mob who lived there, Hudson one of the places
Henry Hudson arrived, Hudson a destination now for thin
Brooklyn tourists who like to eat, Hudson a place we went often
to visit thrift stores when we moved to the other side
of the river 35 years ago when the word gentrification was
not so frequent. Wealthy people moved to Hudson and now,
many stores sell Mid Century Moderne Everything. Hard
to understand what change means and even harder
to know how to interpret what people say.
We asked our waitress last night, a black woman who’d grown
up in Hudson, she’d gone to the Waldorf School nearby,
has a boyfriend in Park Slope, single mother with three
young children, no life is simple, nothing is easy to understand,
we asked her what she thought of the city’s first black
mayor. I went to high school with him she said.
Still things wrong with the city she said. I thought
she would talk about the public schools, or the housing.
Instead of the cement blocks on main street in front of all
the restaurants. I don’t like those blocks she said.
But I do like living here.
Ha! Was looking forward to stopping in Hudson on our way north in a week plus. I am skinny (by middle age standards) and my husband was raised in Brooklyn, so perhaps we are the mew kind of visitors and you might find us eating behind those barricades…