Last Night We Went to Hudson

Hudson is another place now

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.