About Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

We moved to Milwaukee from Manhattan, theoretically for one year, over forty-one years ago. And now, after more thirty-eight years in the same Shorewood house, I guess Adolph and I are long-term threads in the Shorewood fabric. If the streets here could be rutted by bike tire treads, they'd certainly be rutted by mine. And the Community Pool's water probably still contains my DNA from my 25 years of the early morning swim. There'd be tens of thousands of my footprints on Sendiks' floorboards if they hadn't gotten a new floor a couple of years ago. I've painted the lake and written poems seated on Atwater Beach or looking down from the bluff, and I drew hundreds of wordrawings at the Oakland Cafe (now Harry's Place). My husband, Adolph, once sculpted the raucous morning crowd at Benjy's Kosher Deli. Since he retired from teaching art at UWM, he's a chess-playing fixture at Schwartz on Oakland. Our three children went through the Shorewood School system, and some of our grandchildren are there now.
   
Shorewood is a small town. I don't need to plan my social life; if I walk down the block, go shopping or to the Fitness Center, I'm aware the village is populated by people I like.   And populated by the memory of those who moved away or died, house after house with a name in my head that no longer applies.
   
I bike down Oakland Avenue, wondering about its fiery past. Kohl's Foods once burnt (and was rebuilt) where Pick N'Save now stands, we have Schwartz Bookstore where Marc's Big Boy burnt down, Walgreens where the A & P went up in smoke. I guess I'm saying I'm part of Shorewood's fabric, and Shorewood's part of mine, so why not blog?

I can think of plenty of reasons not to, and they all come down to time. Then why blog? Perhaps to force myself to think about, and write about, whatever's going on around me from a different angle, more like a traveler through my own town, but a traveler who already has intimate knowledge of the streets she's winding through.

And when I travel, it's not so much the Great Wall and Forbidden City, not the museums, the restaurants, or battlefields that are still hanging out in my mind years later and that change how I look at the world. It's the contacts with those who live there.
   
And so it is in Shorewood: the people make the town an exciting place to live. And the location. The eastern boundary is an endlessly changing view of Lake Michigan from Atwater Bluff. The western boundary is Estabrook Park with its bike path, its trail along the edge of the Milwaukee River, its budding crab apple trees in spring, its frog-filled duck lagoon. The southern boundary abuts the university with a great range of educational opportunities and events, and beyond that lies the cultural landscape of Milwaukee. So in a sense Shorewood is a small town in a big city.  

If it's the people and the daily life that interest me, I'm looking at Shorewood not as a journalist but as a journaler.