New Year’s pre-memories

Every time I pass by the Barnes & Noble on Seventh Avenue, I remember how I met my boyfriend there. Not the most romantic of meeting spots — I might have preferred the park, or maybe something a more literary like at a reading at the Old Stone House — but nonetheless it was our meeting place and so lovely a moment that the store is inextricably connected to our relationship in my memory.

After 14 years of living here, Park Slope is full of place memories for me — spots that are inextricably attached to a specific event. Around the New Year, I find myself thinking about them even more often.

For my daughter, an intense memory-provoking spot is the corner of Garfield Place and Seventh Avenue. This is where her stepmother got a bloody nose so intense that she needed to be rushed via ambulance to Methodist Hospital. Fortunately, it turned out to be nothing, but for my daughter it isn’t possible to walk past the spot without visions of the blood-stained sidewalk flaring up. This incident was her very own “Nightmare on Garfield Place,” and it plays in her brain with cinematic color.

I just wish the incident had happened on a spot we don’t go past several times a day.

Smartmom columnist, Louise Crawford, can’t walk anywhere in the Slope without remembering something — her own memories and everyone else’s! But one particular section of Eighth Avenue near Ninth Street always evokes traumatic memories of her daughter getting sewn up for one injury or another.

First there was the vicious gate at the Ninth Street playground that attacked her child unprovoked early one evening. That event, which put a nice rip in her forehead, also involved scads of blood and a trip to Methodist.

A bit further up Eighth Avenue is the plastic surgeon they visited to repair another nasty facial gash in hopes that his expert stitchery could prevent a permanent scar on her face.

Another friend thinks about his wedding every time he rides his bike past the Montauk Club, where it took place. For him, the building is bittersweet — he cherishes the memories of his nuptials, but can’t help feeling that the palazzo-style building is a shadow of its Gilded Age self.

A member of my writing group, playwright Rosemary Moore, can’t pass the Ninth Street library without remembering her then 3-year-old twin daughters’ response to a firefighter’s earnest safety talk.

“What is the first thing you do before getting into a hot bathtub?” he asked.

“Get naked!” they both shouted at the same time.

That story reminds me of the time friends of mine who live on Park Place had a big christening party for their daughter in their apartment.

“Everyone gather together for the blessing,” said Alyssa.

The priest opened his mouth and began to intone, “We are here today to celebrate the birth of Maggie Rose…” when my then- 2-year-old daughter announced loudly to the room, “I have to go poopy right now.”

Seeing their building on the corner of Vanderbilt always makes me chuckle.

There are place memories that all of us who live in Park Slope share. Many of us walk past the corner of Sterling and Seventh Avenue and think about the United Airlines jet that crashed there back in the 1960s. Most of us can’t walk past Squad One or Ladder 122 without thinking about 9-11. A lot of us walk past the Park Slope Food Co-op and automatically think of a dozen or so insane or annoying moments that took place there (even the non-members think that!).

This year, I know I will be creating new place memories here in the Slope. None of them will involve the Co-op — since I no longer belong to it. I’m going to try to stay out of Barnes & Noble, since I no longer need the singles scene (not that this is why I went in there in the first place — I swear I was just looking for a book on how to have a better organized office).

I’m looking for place memories that involve good meals in new Slope restaurants, romps in the park with my family and, who knows, maybe my very own, well-organized, office?

Wendy Ponte is a writer and parenting expert who lives in Park Slope.