The Fireflies

New Poetry

A couple of weeks ago, in “The Code,” I wrote about my childhood home, the garden apartment community in Queens, New York in which I lived the first ten years of my life.

The Code: A Fantasia

The garden apartment complex where we lived during my first decade was called – is called – Bell Park Manor Terrace. In the Queens Village neighborhood of suburban looking northeastern Queens, in New York City, it extends over several city blocks on both sides of Hillside Avenue. So well maintained, it looks today exactly as it did then, with its many green, well-manicured lawns among intersecting walkways, its cleanly tended flower beds, its cropped hedges. With our small but inexpensive three-bedroom apartment, it was the best place my family ever lived, before or after my birth, a postwar, Eisenhower-era refuge of sunshine and safety for young veteran families. And just before my tenth birthday, our parents, at our mother’s ever restless behest, moved us away.

Ever after in our family, with wistful longing, that co…