There are ghosts around here. And I’m not talking about the spooky kind. They’re friendly ghosts, like Caspar, ghosts of friends who have moved away from Brooklyn for greener pastures more than 90 minutes from here.

These friends have left behind pieces of of themselves that appear from time to time when I walk past their apartments or the well-worn spots on Seventh Avenue where we used to stand and talk.

Some of these ghosts are good friends, people we try to stay in touch with, and call on the phone. Friends who, regardless of the fact that they abandoned us for a huge Victorian in Rockland County, we continue to love.

Our friends from across the street fall into this category. They’re here but they’re not here. I check their window everytime I leave my building. What I’m checking for I don’t know. Now that it’s spring I half-expect to see her weeding her flower boxes, or pullilng her shopping cart chock-full of gourmet health food from the Food Coop.

And then there are our friends who up and left us for a big Victorian in Upstate New York. I still dial 718 when I call them on the phone. Yesterday I addressed a postcard to them and wrote Brooklyn, New York instead of…

There’s also the family downstairs, whose kids were best friends with ours.  "I’m going down to Eddie’s," was my son’s constant refrain until the day Eddie moved away. Eddie and his sister were like family, as were their two younger siblings, and their parents. Even if we were wildly different in our approaches to things, we found a common ground on Third Street.

This block is also full of ghosts of people that I never got to know but wonder how they are: the single mother with the adopted son from Viet Nam, the woman who writes T.V shows for PBS and her husband and son, the two moms with the two kids who moved to Montclair, the family from Yemen with the spunky daughter (does she wear a veil now that she’s grown up?). And there are more. Plenty more. And they’re all still here in their way.

It’s been hard to figure out how to be friends with the friends who have moved away. it takes time, a year or more, to accept that their ghostly apparitions are just that, and that they’re NOT coming back to the Slope. Denial can be deep.

The next step is learning how to be friends at a distance. Phone calls and addresses must be memorized. New conversational topics must be substituted for the old standbys like: local real estate, 321 teachers, Coop gripes, and Third Street gossip. The ease of shouting up to a window Brooklyn-style, must be replaced with the effort of picking up the phone

But it can be done. First come the good-byes. Then the ghosts. And then, after a very long time, the acceptance that they’re no-longer in their too-small apartment in Brooklyn, but a suburb or town that’s really not that far away.

Yours from Brooklyn,

OTBKB