Crossing the Street
When I moved back to Brooklyn, I finally got to walk my kids to school instead of driving them. We walked under the awning of the apartment building I grew up in every morning. It was surreal. I remembered my latch-key youth, when I used to freewheel all over Brooklyn Heights, nary a nod to a walk or stop indicator, because that’s how Brooklynites rolled. We just walked between the cars.
As a parent, I was leered at numerous times by other parents for walking my kids across the street while holding both of their hands, when there was no walk sign indicating safe passage. This is how I knew they weren’t born here. Free-range parenting was gone, and helicopter parenting had landed. A mom with her kid would be standing on the sidewalk for ninety seconds when there wasn’t a car in sight. It must have taken them forever to get anywhere.
I played games of human Frogger in New York City growing up, dodging yellow cabs and bike messengers with the deftness of an experienced breakdancer about to pop-n-lock their way out of a traffic ticket. I felt so independent as a child, able to walk freely into the world and come home with a candy bar to assuage my loneliness.
I still cross the street the same way, no matter what city I am in. I have no jaywalking tickets to speak of, but the parental leers have not stopped. I’m 55, and I can’t be bothered now to bolster a parent’s restrictions at a walk sign. I have places to be. That place is likely my office chair, which looks directly at a major crosswalk I would call mildly treacherous.
Andrea Jin has a bit about “jacking off in international waters,” and, if you can’t gather from the title, one part of the block is in one province and the other in another, along with some other stuff. Look it up. It’s hilarious. But when I zoomed out on that, I realized that a town, state, or country truly breaks on a line. You can cross from one country into another with a single step.
When I was a prosecutor, we often talked about hot pursuit. A police officer from one city could cross into another city to make an arrest if they were in hot pursuit of someone. The mechanics of what constituted hot pursuit were arguable and often linked to what precipitated the attempted stop in the first place. But we always laughed at the thought of someone thinking they could hightail it over the border of Davie and somehow be safe. Like they would just park and laugh from across the street.
During COVID, crossing the street was the norm to avoid each other. No more waves; it was unbridled fear of an errant sniffle droplet that could land in the pocket of the hoodie you’d been wearing for a week because, well, COVID. Dog coming with its owner, cross. Ugh, another dog coming, cross. Back and forth until we arrived back home to clean our groceries with disinfectant wipes while wearing gloves.
I sometimes imagine how I would feel if I saw my mom across the street, but had to wait out the cars to give her the hug I’ve been missing for more than thirty years.
© Jonathan Greene, September 4, 2026
