Neighborhood

At a recent dinner party, with couples aged sixty-five, and older someone asked the question as to whether things were better when we were growing up than they are for children today. Most of us agreed that was, indeed, the case. This from people who had been witness to the aftermath of The Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War. A recent article in Time Magazine indicated that life expectancy in 1900was about 47 years and is now 78 years. It is projected that children born today have a fifty percent chance of living to 100. Nevertheless the "good old days" aeem to us seniors to be just that.

I believe my growing up years were better than those of my children, who were born in the sixties, largely because of location--a residential area of West Bronx v. the suburbs of Philadelphia.

3280 was, and still is, a six story apartment house for perhaps forty families. There was a fenced-in roof "garden" for residents to sit and take the sun. In those days 3280 was predomimnantly Jewish. It sat behind what was then an elementary school and was a block from a large park commnecting two larger parks. Bronx Park housed a Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo. Van Cortland Park had a large lake for skating in the winter. Two major shopping areas, two movie theatres, an Indepndent Subway System station and bus lines were with walking distance. The schoolyard provided recreational activities for thousands of children. Motherts congregated on summer afternoons, sitting on camp chairs and rocking baby carriages. Husbands had their oiwn area where they chatted about businbess and smiked their pipes and cigars. A large playground area surrounded the public reservoir and had football fields, playground eqipment, a wading pool, a running track and bicycle path. Public benches aorund the "Oval" provided respite for people on hot summer evenings. 3280 housed at least half a dozen families with children my age. We would wander from one apartment to the next, moving only when the parents became intolerant of the noise or horseplay and commanded, "Go play sopmewhere else." In the days before television we never lacked for friends or activities to occupy us. A Superintendent,the Super" was there to service the heating system, shovel snow, cut the hedges, and make minor repairs. Schools were free of drugs, teachers commanded respect, and the education provided was good. All of my friends went to college. Subways were safe so that, as adolescents, we were free to travel to other aras of the Broinx, to Manhattan, and, later, even Coney Island by subway. What I am describing here would be called today a "community." We called it our "neighborhood."

Aftert VJ Day post-war America entered a peiod of relative prosperty, at least for the middle class. The next step upward from The Bronx was a move to the suburbs where houses had lawns and the area was less crowded. My parents moved to Yonkers. We became lawn mowers and gardeners. No longer convenient to public transportation, my father had to drive to work in Manhattan and pay for parking.
When I married we started out in a garden-type apartment in the Germantown area of Philadelphia. The tenants were young families, like ours, with babies and toddlers. As soon as I was able to afford the downpayment we, too, moved to the suburbs. My children had few friends on the block. Pople largely kept to themselves.

Shortly before my mother died, my sister and I took her to visit the old neighborhood in the Bronx. 3280 was now occupied by Hispanic people. The old school yard was a parking lot for teachers or others. The area may still be a neighborhood but no longer middle class. We rode the old elevator to the fifth floor but I was reluctant to ring the bell of our old apartment. Thomas Wolf was right. "You can't go home again."
Posted by Psychwrite at 5:31 AM 0 comments
Labels: Community, extended family, neighborhood, suburbs

Of dreams and arrogance

I suppose I should change the name of this blog to "occasional psychwriter." No apologies but here I am again. The end of the school year may herald greater productivity but no promises. I will continue to transfer some of my old blogs
here (I can access them but not post new blogs on the original site) and add a new
piece...occasionally.

Sharon Bagely,science editor of Newsweek did an article titled "The hidden brain." Until recently many neuroscientists described default brain activity, when a person is doing nothing but resting, staring off into space or dreaming, as meaningless, random noise. The neuro establishment now seems to be reversing itself on this position. When the brain is in a default mode and our mind is blank, brain neurons are chattering away, expending twenty times as much energy as when we are consciously engaged in thought--thinking, feeling, and using our senses. Scientists are now concluding that this activity is more than just a background murmur; it must serve some important function. One theory is that default brain activity prepares it for future contingencies. It creates images that help us make sense out of real experiences. It integrates memories,imagines the future, plays out possible scenerios to help us navigate social situations.

I am no stranger to neuroscientific hubris. When I was writing my dream books I ran
smack up against an NIH neuroscientist that Chelsea House Books used as a consultant. He had a distinct bias against anything subjective and was not at all happy with psychology, which I'm sure he categorized as a pseudoscience. Like many others of his ilk, he considered dreams to be noise. The publisher insisted that half of my book be devoted to the brain. I acquiesced and the title became "Sleep and Dreaming," not he book I intended to write, and I had to scrap the best parts of my manuscript.

My thesis was that dreams have no Freudian, unconscious purpose, but do have meaning. I found that to be so in my own dreams as well as those of patients I had treated. Begley's summary of recent neuroscientific thinking drives home both the arrogance of those who dismiss subjective processes as unimportant and my own faith in the significance of many drerams. They provide evidence of what the brain is doing when we sleep, perhaps as important as brain wave readings. If the new theories hold water, then we can learn from dreams by considering them as the sleeping brain's efforts to organize, process, sort out, integrate, classify, utilize past and present experiences, and to prepare us for future events. If we can interpret the information gleaned from dreams then we are in some ways better off for the effort.