Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) (22 page)

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Authors: Alex McCord,Simon van Kempen

BOOK: Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)
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Alex
Quite right, in all their years of schooling neither boy has shared a classroom with a Tom, Jennifer, Sara or John. But even going beyond names, the microcosm that is New York City is fascinating to kids and adults.
During the holidays in New York we try to take the kids to see the decorations and sights, but don’t like fighting the crowds at the same time. One New Year’s Eve, we decided to drive around to see the holiday windows at Bendel’s, Bergdorf ’s, Bloomingdales and other department stores, knowing that most tourists would be in Times Square awaiting the ball drop. As we passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral on the way to Saks, the boys noticed that there were lots of police officers milling about outside, presumably waiting for midnight and watching for drunken people.
François: What are those?
Alex: Paddy wagons (I kept my answer short as I was trying to see where we could park to look at the windows )
François: Why are they there?
Alex: To keep us safe
François: From the church?
 
 
(Simon and I nearly died laughing over his innocent question )
We share so much with our kids on a daily basis just going about the city, and when family comes in from out of town it’s kind of thrilling (aren’t we such good parents? … let’s injure our hands patting ourselves on the back!) to hear our kids act as tour guides. When Johan pipes up to tell our visiting friend, “We’re in Chinatown, where dumplings come from,” we have to laugh. Whether it’s a stroll down the Brooklyn Promenade, a visit to the Chrysler Building or the Central Park Zoo, it’s amazing to see the pride they have in their city, even at a young age. They love New York as much as we do.
TOP 10 REASONS NEW YORK IS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE TO A KID:
 
10. The ice cream factory at the Fulton Ferry Landing.
9. Standing in the middle of the walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge
screaming our heads off at the cars going under our feet
8. Pausing at the entrance to a skyscraper and watching your child crane their neck all the way back yet they still can’t see the top of the building: “Daddy does that building go all the way up to the moon?”
7. Coney Island
6. Every weekend there’s a street carnival in at least one neighborhood
5. Instead of watching Sesame Street on TV you can go and watch it being filmed.
4. There are more songs with NYC in their titles than any other city
3. All the best superheroes live in Gotham City! “Mommy where is Batman
s house? In Manhattan or Brooklyn?”
2. There
s a sense that anything is possible at any moment I
ve never once heard our kids say something“can’t be done”
1. If a kid says “I live in New York no further explanation is needed
 
 
Chapter 14
 
“Daddy, a Cow! And It’s Not in a Zoo!”
 
Getting Urban Kids Out of the City
and Into Greener Pastures
 
Simon
When Alex and I first broached the possibility that we’d have children together, after years of stating we wouldn’t, the second thing I had to reconcile was that they were going to have a vastly different childhood than mine. All parents want their children to have advantages they lacked but apart from that, the biggest difference for me was that my childhood was just so different than theirs would be—not least being separated by four decades and 10,000 miles.
I was born in Brisbane, the capital city of the state of Queensland in Australia, which at that time had a population of just over 600,000 and when I was three we moved to a very small town in western New South Wales (NSW), Walgett, with a population of under 2,000, most of whom were Aborigines, Australia’s indigenous peoples. Not long before my sixth birthday we moved again, 450 miles east to a small coastal town in northern NSW called Ballina. I remember as we drove in, as a family of six, we passed the town sign stating:
Ballina, NSW, Population 6,000
. My father suggested that one of us should jump out and change the final zero to a “6.”
 
Simon, Age 5, in Walgett, Australia
 
We spent the next seven years there and it was a wonderful place for a young boy, aged from five years, 10 months to 13 to spend his preteen years. But just six weeks after we arrived I became fatherless, a situation that has probably affected me in more ways than I realize. I vividly remember being woken by Mum at around 6 a.m. one morning and being told that Dad had died during the night. Weirdly my first comment was to ask if I should go and wake my 10-year-old brother, who was still sleeping in our room. No, it wasn’t necessary, she said. He needed to sleep, as he’d been up half the night helping Mum. The next few months honestly remain a blur in my memory; we returned to Brisbane for a short time and I went to school there for a few weeks before heading back to Ballina, although I have no idea why—the only tie to the area was that my father was buried there.
Throughout those years we lived in five different houses: Cherry Street, Norton Street, Skinner Street, Pine Avenue, East Ballina and finally North Creek Road. Ballina has a very temperate climate with lots of rain as well as many streams, farms and woods (and mischievously—golf courses, which I’ll come to later!) for playing outdoors. Many a day I’d spend fishing tadpoles out of streams and brought them home in jars to watch them grow legs before releasing them when they were almost too big to fit in the jar. Or I would marvel at sugar cane burning time and at the many creatures that would race away from the burn off onto our rear lawn that abutted the sugar farm. I particularly remember picking up and carrying into the house one year what I thought was a little whip snake, a mildly poisonous snake, and watching my older brother freak out. In fact, I’d carried in Australia’s most deadly snake, the brown. We promptly went outside and beheaded it. While my childhood might have been a financially hard one, it was certainly in these years an exciting one and in reality we lacked for very little. Sure we didn’t have a color TV, but with only two channels available to us anyway and the great outdoors beckoning, it was much more fun to get on our bikes and go riding and exploring the outskirts of town. There were near misses I suppose as both my younger brother and I were befriended by this old guy, Dick, who lived on the outskirts of town in a small tin shed. I was 12 and Adam was 8, and Dick loved for us to come over to his home or shed and would give us cookies and take us on excursions to the town dump to look for useful things. (Today it has a trendy name “free-cycling,” but then was called scavenging.) Many an afternoon during our long school summer vacation, Adam and I would spend with Dick and while things were never that inappropriate (he occasionally pulled out an early
Playboy
magazine back from the days when the lower regions were airbrushed out), I do remember hearing as a young adult one time when I was back visiting that there had been pretty strong rumors of pedophilia.
For those long summer months Dick would regale us about WWII, take us fishing or town dump scavenging and while he never ever became a surrogate father figure to me, I can’t deny that there were times that being around an older man, even if he was old enough to be my grandfather, made me miss my own even more.
So the two biggest differences I foresaw for my boys was 1) I wanted to stay alive long enough to father them and 2) Ballina and New York City are two pretty different places.
The most obvious thing that inner city urban living entails is that the majority of the population (and children) live in apartment buildings, particularly in high-density cities like NYC and Paris. We did for the first 22 months of François’ life, but once Johan was on the way I was determined, as was Alex, to own our own bit of dirt. Alex once made a comment that became infamous about not wanting to live in the suburbs, and that’s true for both of us, although it wasn’t meant to appear as derogatory as it did. Buying our townhouse in Cobble Hill, not only allowed us to have a 22 by 40-foot backyard with a swing-set, blow-up pool in the summer as well as a concreted area for trikes and dirt to play in, but it also abuts and joins onto some 46 other backyards. This creates what I’ve read is called an “urban donut hole”—a mini oasis of trees and greenery flanked by buildings, which welcomes all sorts of animals throughout the year; squirrels are abundant. Recently a raccoon wandered into our house late one night. We have beautiful red cardinals, blue jays, the occasional woodpecker and a myriad of other birds I’ve yet to identify fly in.

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