Begin Again

Patricia Mulcahy

Word Count 1092

As I approach my seventieth birthday, I grow more enamored of beginnings: No clock should constrict the imagination’s reach.

As a child, I associated time and its measurement with constraint in the deadening silence enforced by the nuns in elementary school. When we put our heads down on our desks for prayer and reflection, the ticking of the school clock punctuated our collective boredom: How long could we endure this excruciating stillness? Time was nothing but a burden, and clocks were its punishing implements.

My rebellion against the dictates of time may also stem from the fact that I am the oldest of six children. To relieve my overburdened mother, I became my youngest brother’s default caretaker. At the local playground in suburban Philadelphia, I was frequently mistaken for a teen mom—showing me how our sense of time is so often beholden to events beyond our individual ken.

My search for a lost childhood—that elusive, supposedly carefree time—culminated in marriage to a man I met in college who made me laugh and temporarily forget about my overdeveloped sense of duty; we competed to be the life of every party. Yes, he was emotionally immature, which is part of why I liked him.

After our divorce, I threw myself into my job in book publishing and marked time by promotions in a business once derided by my husband as “a female galley slave industry.” I reveled in beginnings and reinventions: Nothing made me happier than discovering and nurturing debut talent. It was as if I, too, were starting over, a new woman throwing off the shackles of the tried, the true, and the hackneyed.

There was no clock I lived by other than a chance to make my own way and to honor the sacrifices my family made to move us up the economic ladder. My parents were both the first in their families to go to college. One grandfather was a janitor, my grandmother a telephone operator. My mother’s mother, one of fourteen children in a farm family in Vermont, made hats. My other grandad ran a movie theater that went bust because he wasn’t sure talkies were “here to stay.”

The tick-tock of American advancement was the soundtrack of my inner life. Eventually my hard work was rewarded with the ultimate promotion, to editor in chief of a major publisher. But as I sat at the head of the conference table looking out at the eager faces of staff members, I flashed back inadvertently to the many nights I was left in charge when my parents went out, and secretly yearned to join my two brothers and three sisters in the food fights they were waging.

In following opportunity, had I wound up distinctly off my beat? When I was ousted in a corporate shake-up after just two years in the top job, the question was rendered moot.

Eighteen months before I lost my job, I had opened a coffee shop in my raggedy but beloved Brooklyn neighborhood as a “grassroots” alternative to corporate life, a place for readings and book launches, a gathering spot for local artists and other neighbors. The borough had a reputation then as a crime-ridden backwater, far from today’s image as a creative haven. What looked like a risky venture and a side gig became my clean, well-lighted place.

But with no time for a “self-edit,” I now measured the clock in employee dramas, backbreaking efforts to maintain narrow profit margins, and most importantly, the race to keep up as the neighborhood gentrified around us.

Fourteen years serving lattes and cappuccinos; gingerbread like your grandma used to make; bagels with homemade cream cheeses laced with tabasco for kick; smoothies and yogurt parfaits; panini sandwiches heated on the grill: We built a “neighborhood institution,” until it became clear that a coffee shop on a highly desirable corner in a burgeoning borough was no longer viable. It's an old New York story: facing a rent increase, it became clear we’d priced ourselves right out of the neighborhood we helped gentrify. Brownstones down the street from our shop now sold for over a million dollars.

When a reporter for the Wall Street Journal wandered in, my business partner Amos told her: “The shop doesn’t fit the neighborhood anymore the way it did when it first opened.”

I could not say that he was wrong.

I will always have Frank’s funeral. Frank was a handsome man with thinning brown hair who sat in front of the store each day smoking a fat, smelly cigar. He possessed a quiet dignity befitting a bomber pilot who flew over fifty missions during the Great War. The day after he had a heart attack, I headed over to the funeral home across from the coffee shop. In his casket, Frank lay peacefully with a small bottle of his favorite whiskey, Johnny Walker Red, and lo and behold, a treats card from our store: buy ten, get one free.

We hung on—as long as we could manage. You cannot outrun the clock, especially in an ever-churning place like New York City.

Three years before the shop finally closed, I shocked friends and Brooklyn neighbors by moving to Queens, to pay off some debt and lower my overhead. The first time I visited my old friend Charles there, I was spooked by his neighborhood’s superficial resemblance to the place where I grew up outside Philadelphia, a bastion of cookie-cutter brick houses with tiny yards.

But when he suggested I take a look at a newly renovated unit in the 1930s building located in a historic garden district, I realized I was ready to leave my apartment in a nineteenth century converted convent and move on to the twentieth.

Now I live surrounded by immigrants, people beginning again in a new country: there are Tibetan restaurants, Colombian steak houses, Peruvian chicken joints, and Afghan kebab places; a health food store run by Indians; cubbyhole storefronts selling wind-up toys, Catholic religious statuary, and South American folk crafts; and plenty of 99 cent shops.

During the Covid epidemic, our bustling, crowded neighborhood was the epicenter of the epicenter in the city. During the lowest days of lockdown, a huge heart composed of protective gloves hung in the window of a local Colombian café, festooned with tiny bottles of hand sanitizer, and hanging gloves emblazoned with words like clean, limpieza; health; amor; faith; protection; tolerance; patience, pazienza; protection; do not lose your mind.

Time unfolds each day amid the rambunctious hustle of new lives.

Do not lose your mind: Pazienza.

Patricia formed the editorial consulting service Brooklyn Books (http://brooklynbooks.com) after over twenty years in book publishing. She started as a temp at Farrar Straus and Giroux and left as Editor in Chief at Doubleday. Her authors included bestselling crime writers James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly.