Around the Way Gurl
by Mark Anthony Neal
It started innocent enough; subway platform at the Dekalb Avenue station in Brooklyn, uptown bound BMT train. I was smitten at first sight. I was 16 and she was month or two from 15. We were both from the Bronx, grew up five minutes from each other. It was the spring of 1982 and whatever rhetorical gifts I possess now, they were unknown to me then. After a few days of staring, two of my boys—who both would serve as groomsmen nearly a decade later—urged me to at least ask her name. “Peaches?. what the hell kind of name is that” I recall another friend chiming in. Baby girl of the family, southern roots, the “light one”—as I would come to understand years later. Nevertheless, contact was made, however awkward. Then as in now, she set the agenda, I just followed. But springtime romances are just what they are: fast and fleeting. After a few months we both moved on.
It had been some time since I had seen or thought about her when she called out to me in the Village in the autumn of 1987. We were on Broadway, between 8th Street and Astor Place, right in front of the Benetton that used to be there. I had just graduated from college and she was in her third year at NYU. We exchanged numbers and I didn’t think too much about it, until she called weeks later at the urging of a co-worker. We did the requisite movie date—Barbara Streisand’s Nuts was the film, dinner was at the original "Dallas" BBQ restaurant on 8th street. My lasting memory of the date was her running out of my car when I brought home, though 22 years later, she still denies this.
There were more dates to follow—the Christmas eve date where I locked my keys in my car and had to race across Manhattan by foot to meet her in the basement of Macy’s by David's Cookies, only for my cashless ass (I used my cash pay the locksmith) to take her to dinner to a restaurant that didn’t take credit cards. By every right she should have stepped then, but there was something that kept her interested. I guess I was a good guy.
Within a year we were serious and got engaged on New Year’s Eve 1990 at Chinese Restaurant—now long gone—on 2nd avenue and 32nd Street. We were married in Harlem—on 155th street on the Westside. Her pastor officiated and sang “In the Garden” in a way that our southern parents appreciated more than anything. Still an aspiring poet I read original verse. My best man’s future bride and her singing partner sang Be Be and Ce Cen Winans’ “I’m Lost Without You.” Many remarked about how long I embraced her after we said “I Do.” We took wedding photos in front of Grant’s Tomb and marched into our reception at Columbia University’s International House to “Optimistic” by the Sound of Blackness. Our first dance was to Al Green’s “God Blessed Our Love.” And indeed, 18 years later we have been blessed.
Like any couple we struggle with day-to-day realities. There have been many challenges along the way. Sometimes in the midst of raising two demanding and brilliant little girls, the two of us get lost. Sometimes, she gets lost as my ambitions drive me in every direction, but home. But we always seem to find our grounding. Perhaps it’s the values that we share, two children of the South Bronx, whose working class parents held out in the hope that we would be the very overachievers that we’ve became. Between them, our parents put in more than 90 years of marriage and death was the only thing that stood in their way. There was no question that we were gonna survive.
The only thing I know now is that this woman has made me a better man—and I’ve become a good husband and an even better father. And yeah, I still won’t mop the floor without asking and there’s still that toilet seat thing, but that’s what the next 18 years are for.
It had been some time since I had seen or thought about her when she called out to me in the Village in the autumn of 1987. We were on Broadway, between 8th Street and Astor Place, right in front of the Benetton that used to be there. I had just graduated from college and she was in her third year at NYU. We exchanged numbers and I didn’t think too much about it, until she called weeks later at the urging of a co-worker. We did the requisite movie date—Barbara Streisand’s Nuts was the film, dinner was at the original "Dallas" BBQ restaurant on 8th street. My lasting memory of the date was her running out of my car when I brought home, though 22 years later, she still denies this.
There were more dates to follow—the Christmas eve date where I locked my keys in my car and had to race across Manhattan by foot to meet her in the basement of Macy’s by David's Cookies, only for my cashless ass (I used my cash pay the locksmith) to take her to dinner to a restaurant that didn’t take credit cards. By every right she should have stepped then, but there was something that kept her interested. I guess I was a good guy.
Within a year we were serious and got engaged on New Year’s Eve 1990 at Chinese Restaurant—now long gone—on 2nd avenue and 32nd Street. We were married in Harlem—on 155th street on the Westside. Her pastor officiated and sang “In the Garden” in a way that our southern parents appreciated more than anything. Still an aspiring poet I read original verse. My best man’s future bride and her singing partner sang Be Be and Ce Cen Winans’ “I’m Lost Without You.” Many remarked about how long I embraced her after we said “I Do.” We took wedding photos in front of Grant’s Tomb and marched into our reception at Columbia University’s International House to “Optimistic” by the Sound of Blackness. Our first dance was to Al Green’s “God Blessed Our Love.” And indeed, 18 years later we have been blessed.
Like any couple we struggle with day-to-day realities. There have been many challenges along the way. Sometimes in the midst of raising two demanding and brilliant little girls, the two of us get lost. Sometimes, she gets lost as my ambitions drive me in every direction, but home. But we always seem to find our grounding. Perhaps it’s the values that we share, two children of the South Bronx, whose working class parents held out in the hope that we would be the very overachievers that we’ve became. Between them, our parents put in more than 90 years of marriage and death was the only thing that stood in their way. There was no question that we were gonna survive.
The only thing I know now is that this woman has made me a better man—and I’ve become a good husband and an even better father. And yeah, I still won’t mop the floor without asking and there’s still that toilet seat thing, but that’s what the next 18 years are for.
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