I Dream Of Brooklyn

Last Sunday's episode of HBO "Girls" had everyone confused.  It was a dreamlike episode, unfolding surreally.  We saw Hannah as we never had before.  She wasn't eating Cool Whip out of the container in her small Brooklyn apartment, complaining about her horrible love life.  Instead, she spent two days with a handsome doctor, barbecuing steaks on the patio of his brownstone and taking a sauna in his giant bathroom.  The episode was like a fantasy of what Hannah's life could be in the future if she stopped struggling and earning $40 a day at "Grumpy's Cafe" and instead lived the lavish lifestyle of a doctor's wife in an expensive Brooklyn brownstone.  Hannah was awake, but she was dreaming.

Not too long ago, I had an actual nighttime dream about Brooklyn.  I dreamed that it was an early Saturday morning, and I called up my best childhood friend, Ania, and told her that there was nothing I wanted more in this world than to go to her condo in Brooklyn really early in the morning and hang out together.  The desire in the dream was so strong.

From the time I was 8 until 18, Ania and I were inseparable.  We spent almost every single day together.  She lived on the corner across from my street, so I would call her up and we'd meet outside and hang out all day.  She was always just a phone call away.

The next day after the dream, I e-mailed Ania and asked, "Can we set a date to get together? Like at your house?"  She wrote back, pleased.  "You want to come to Brooklyn? I'd love that."  So we set a date for breakfast.

On the scheduled Saturday morning, my family set out for Brooklyn to have breakfast with Ania's family.  Her husband cooked eggs with salsa and Mexican cheese.  Ania made vodka breakfast cocktails.  My daughter and her son took turns riding his scooter back and forth on the hardwood floors while the rest of us sat on stools and talked all morning.

Last spring, Ania said that she'd often come home from work to find the HBO "Girls" film crew sitting on the front steps of her condo.  They were filming the second season in her neighborhood right in front of her house.  And now Hannah and I were both fantasizing about alternate lives.  Hannah imagined what it would be like to have the material things and lifestyle the doctor had. I fantasized about what it would be like if I could revisit my childhood -- the constant daily steadiness with Ania, playing Connect Four on her front steps at 9:00 in the morning when no one else in our neighborhood was outdoors yet.  This is the fantasy of my alternate life.

But Hannah doesn't really want to go into the future and be settled yet. She'd lose her edge, her writer's restlessness and her need to, in her words, "Feel it all."  I don't really want to go back to my childhood, all that uncertainty and second-guessing.  I finally feel secure with a fierce sense of responsibility.  But sometimes, it's nice to dream with the background setting of a really nice condo or brownstone in Brooklyn.

Why I'm Old School

Recently, I had a flashback.  It happened while teaching my daughter to play backgammon.  As I explained the mechanics of the game, I suddenly flashed back to my nine-year-old self learning to play with my best friend, Ania, whose dad taught us after giving her a set for her seventh birthday.  She had been so disappointed to find a little brown suitcase after the wrapping paper came off, but we learned the game, and we were forever hooked.  Ania's aunt and uncle had a blue leather backgammon set with blue swirl and white chips. As soon as I saw it, I told Ania that when I grew up, I was going to get one just like it.

We played constantly, and didn't even play competitively.  Half the time, we never knocked each other's chips off the board, even when they were left single and vulnerable.  It was so relaxing to just move the pieces, hear and feel the sound of the dice rolling in the cup, and just talk about other things while our hands focused on moving our chips, closer and closer to home. 

I prefer old school games to computer ones or X-Box.  At Chuck E. Cheese's, I go straight to the skeeball and would have no trouble staying there the entire time.  The constant movement of my right arm tossing the ball, getting better and better with each throw, having to get the gentle tug of my arm just right to get the ball into those little circles at the top.  Maybe they are 1,000 points, but I don't even know because I don't play to get tickets, I like to stand there and think of other things while my arm tosses the ball as second nature. 

This love of the tangible is similar to people saying they love the feel of a book and smell of its pages rather than using the Kindle.  Or those who have said the sound of the grooves of a vinyl album and its wear and tear transports them back to the first time they heard the songs. But more than the tangible, for me it's that zoned-out relaxed feeling that I love when I play backgammon.  I can't imagine getting  that feeling while staring at bright lights on a laptop version of the game.  Being zoned out, then having my laptop freeze or crash, forcing me back into reality.  That can't happen while I'm playing the board game.

Backgammon is zen to me, which is defined as "absorption or a meditative state."  While playing backgammon, you're cleaning out your mind because you are focusing on moving the pieces on the board, your thoughts have emptied.  You have redirected your focus.

After I taught my daughter backgammon, we immediately turned on my laptop.  We didn't do it to play a virtual board game or for social networking or FarmVille.  We did it so we could do a Google search in hopes of finding a blue leather, blue and white swirl chip backgammon set.