This is a multi-part series from OTBKB reader and frequent commenter: Brooklyn Beat (his bio is below):

It’s time you walked away
set me free I must move away leave you be…
time’s been good to us, my friend
wait and see how it will end
we come and go as we please…we come and go as we please…
that’s how it must be
Here in crystal chandelier, I’m home
too many days, I’ve left unstoned
if you don’t mind happiness
purple-pleasure fields in the Sun
ah, don’t you know I’m runnin’ home…don’t you know I’m runnin’ home…
to a place to you unknown?
I take great peace in your sitting there
searching for myself, I find a place there
I see the people of the world where they are and what they could be…
I can but dance behind your smile…
I can but dance behind your smile…
you were the world to me for a while
— "D.C.B.A. " by Paul Kantner, Jefferson Airplane

Wow, besides now fading"The Sopranos" finale (which my son is already
tired of hearing my digressions and speculations on), the Summer of
Love, 1967, is popping up in the media as a cultural icon of the Summer
2007.

40 years ago this summer, I was a 12 year old, the age that my
younger daughters are now, and I was an elementary school kid at Holy
Name on  Prospect Park West (or 9th avenue as it was often referred).

Music of the era made its way to my consciousness thanks to the radio
and the LPs that my older sister, then in high school at St Brendans,
brought into the house.Although the music and the culture were
exploding around me, it would still be a few years until I started
writing and pursuing publication in earnest as a student at Bishop Ford
HS and before I began to select and buy music much less dare to make
critical assessments of it..

But then, back in 1967, I was still an
elementary school brat at HNS (or, as our Windsor Terrace crowd later
referred to it in our rebellious teen years, at "The Mission"). Music
was everywhere, New York City, at least the mainstream and parts of the
city locked into the media maelstrom, was undergoing waves of change,
but Brooklyn, my Brooklyn, was still dormant.I grew up on 17th Street
between 9th and 10th avenues. I remember a young couple moving into the
basement apartment of a home across the street from us. He had the hip
look, long hair and beard, dressed for business during the week if I
recall correctly, but most noticeably, on the weekend wore jeans and
high leather boots, the first time such cool and radical fashion
probably trod these Brooklyn streets..

We referred to him simply as
"Cow Man" and I sincerely hope that we were not teasing or mean to him,
although, children being who they are, we probably were and came off as
dumb Brooklyn urchins..He lived next door to the "Stretzelmeyer"
(pronounced by us as "Stretchemeyer") home, which was a remnant of old
Brooklyn, a large Victorian house, like we live in now in Flatbush, but
it was on a large piece of land, fenced in from 17th street to Prospect
Avenue, behind a fairly high grey fence..two elderly ladies lived
there, largely out of touch with the rest of us Irish, German and
Italian working folks who had moved into the neighborhood in succeeding
waves. We would see them occasionally when a ball went over the fence
and they were patient enough to allow us into the yard to retrieve
it..I imagined the house and the sisters were from "Arsenic and Old
Lace" and I assume the house had been there from the 19th century when
Windsor Terrace was more open land, farms, etc., and the brownstones
and row houses of 17th street and beyond had simply grown up around
them.

That reminds me of another childrens’ book, about a little cabin
in the woods, that becomes a small home, and is eventually dwarfed by
the City structures and skyscrapers built around it. Years later, when
the homes was taken down and new construction was built on the site.
The home and fenced in land were easily replaced by four or five
attached homes on 17th street and an equal number around the block on
Prospect Avenue…

Tune in tomorrow for Summer in Love in Brooklyn by Brooklyn Beat.

BIO: BB resides deep in the heart of Brooklyn in Fiske Terrace with his wife and four kids (ages 12-19) and a voracious Corgi. When not up to his elbows as a manager/analyst/writer in organizational realms, BB reflects on life’s mysteries, and other issues as befits a superannuated existencialista, and attempts to give expression to them in his writing, blogging, illustration, and painting.