New Brunswick, New Jersey

I was driving from Boston to Raleigh for a family reunion and decided to take a detour through New Brunswick, New Jersey, the home of all my earliest childhood memories. I grew up to the age of seven on the 16th floor of the Colony Building, a creamy-manila edifice that towered over the lush, to-the-point-of too-lush, Buccleuch park. I hadn’t been back to this place since I was 7. The scale of the map and distance between memory locales had of course shrunken – but I was surprised to find so many similarities to the images in my mind. I took pics of the details that stuck out to me for one reason or another. To recreate the scenes from my memory. - The rough concrete surface under my thumb forms a smooth contour of the lions face.

- The dugout bench and the warped chain-link fence. Im glad they still haven’t fixed this place up.

-The adult-sized swings and my babysitter telling me about her ex as she sadly dangled there while I excitedly pranced around the playground vowing to battle the X, a new unknown enemy apparently at large in the world.

-My sneakers sinking into the red clay by the creek bed – the area most likely to be rich with dinosaur fossils (I wanted to be a paleontologist)

-The place where @alexandermwirth and I made a “ball catching machine” in the outfield during our baseball team try out. I forsure didn’t end up playing. 

This was a low-hanging-fruit of personal reflection that I’m glad to have sunken my teeth into it. This post may be considered the fibery, sucrosy residue left around my face for the world to see. It was ripee aand umm yeah this metaphor is ready to be finished.