Last weekend when I was engaging in one of the many possible activities that make me stand out as a typical white person in my mostly-black neighborhood — in this instance, trudging the few extra blocks home from the express stop I had to pretend I meant to get off at (so as not to draw attention to the whiteness of not knowing when trains randomly decide to go from local to express with no warning) with a recycled plastic tote full of WholeFoods organic frozen fruit bars about to melt slung o’er my shoulder — a little girl who’d been zipping up and down the sidewalk on her scooter looked up at me and said, “Oh, hi.”

Now, keep in mind that by “little” here, we’re talking three, maybe four years old. Completely unsupervised, as far as I could tell — a little roly-poly thing with a pink pontail holder / barrette scheme, a pink-themed outfit, on a pink scooter — the littlest, cheeks-pinchable, squeezable chublet with the most attitude I’ve ever seen, out there on the sidewalk by herself, positively owning Bed-Stuy.

“Oh, hi,” she said, as though she’d been expecting me.

“Hi!” I replied, perhaps over-cheerfully, not because that’s what’s expected of white people in black neighborhoods, but because I was genuinely elated to be receiving a genuine greeting from someone, as opposed to a slow, frowning nod from an elderly man making his way scowlingly up his front stoop with a cane, pausing on step three for long enough to note the blonde jogger with headphones passing by without breaking stride to come sit down and chat for the rest of the afternoon, because that is how we do here in this ‘hood, and if you don’t comply, obviously you’re an evil harbinger of gentrification.

The little girl continued zipping back and forth as I made my way homeward along Jefferson Street. And then I thought I heard something over the music on my mp3 player:

“Girl!”

No, that must have been coming from someplace–

“Girl!”

I turned around, and the little roly-poly pink-clad tot was paused with her scooter, staring down the sidewalk at me.

“You live here, gir’?”

I don’t think I can accurately do justice to the amount of good-natured sassiness pouring out of this little girl, but I think I began to tear up at this point.

“Er, yes — I live right over there,” pointing west.

She looked at me for a moment, like she was trying to picture where, exactly, I meant, and then:

“Oh. Okay. Bye-bye.”

And with a smile she turned on her three year-old heel, literally to push off from the ground and start her scooter scooting in the opposite direction.

Too young and innocent to know that she’s supposed to hate me because I’m white; just thought she was making a friend.

And? She made one.

Plus, now I can sleep better at night, knowing the sassiest little pre-kindergartener in Brooklyn’s got my back.

Throughout my life, I have walked past Ed Vass’s house. I have moped past Ed Vass’s house. I’ve driven past, biked past — strolled, crept, slunk, slithered, crawled by the light of the moon past Ed Vass’s house. Up until last weekend, I’d done just about everything that one can do involving both ambulation and Ed Vass’s house.

Except jog.

I should have known in advance that it would be viewed as blasphemous. To show off, to exhibit pride in front of Ed Vass’s house. To refrain from reapplying lipstick and adjusting one’s decolletage prior to tiptoeing within about three-hundred yards of Ed Vass’s house.

As I huffed and puffed past — makeup-less and red-faced, voiceless and unsmiling — for the first time in my life I didn’t care what Ed Vass (who, by the way, has been married for awhile now with at least one child, and living several towns away) thought. I didn’t care if anyone was looking out the window to catch a glimpse of Bess Jankowski coughing up phlegm in a chest-flattening sports bra and dorky salmon-colored sneakers, winded and disoriented — out for herself and herself alone — instead of leaning up against a lamppost smoking a cigarette in the shadows — sparkly-eyed and flowy-haired, shy and oblivious — waiting for a sign of the dog of the cousin’s twice-removed brother’s step-sister of Ed Vass, like they’re used to.

The goddesses could forgive me on the way out, but on the way back? Not to care how I looked going up The Hill in Front of Ed Vass’s House™? Panting unembarrassedly, sweating unsexily; the illustrated death of femininity?

I have run and run through Bedford-Stuyvesant and Clinton Hill, jogged and power-walked through Crown and Prospect Heights. I have jump-jigged and kick-twirled over Fulton Street cement squares and Clifton Place bluestone slabs alike — every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for half an hour each, with no more serious physical ramification than good ol’ healthy thigh pain — up until last weekend.

Ever since I jogged past Ed Vass’s house last weekend, I’ve had tendinitis in both ankles and can hardly walk down a flight of stairs, let alone run.

Ever since I inadvertently renounced my childhood god, I’ve been plagued.

A couple weeks ago I ordered a bunch of items from Forever 21, because whenever I go into their store on 14th St., it’s impossible to move around and look at things without getting plowed over by a gaggle of NYU Froshchicks and their token painstakingly mulleted townie (read: dropped out of NYU last year, subsisting quite comfortably “in town” on trust fund) boyfriends.

Even if you’ve successfully managed to find something worth standing on line to purchase — and I won’t lie, Forever 21 has come through for me on more than one urgent occasion (read: the black tie-appropriate flapper dress) — you still have to suffer through the camp counselor-esque saleswomen behind the counter, calling out, “Okay, girls! Two separate lines, girls — please form two. separate. lines! And have your IDs ready!”

Don’t get me wrong — I take it as a compliment when I’m carded at liquor stores and bars — but when online with a store full of wannabe-American Apparel hipster models (read: ugly and tasteless but skinny) making a big show of getting their trucker hatted open-relationship boyfriends to buy them a handful of $3.99 panties (I’m sorry, I hate the word but you know it’s the one they use), the second someone blows into a whistle and cheer-shouts the word “ID”, it’s all you can do to put your items down and step away from Union Square as fast as your 31 year-old legs will take you.

Anyway, before I bolted, I did see a couple things that caught my eye, including some “panties” — or, as I like to call them, “boyshorts” — and some boy’s shorts — or, as I like to call them, “pair of shorts for the boy.” See, the boy has needed a pair of madras shorts for quite some time now (if you met him, you’d be shocked he wasn’t born wearing a pair), and while there’s always the seasonally trusty J. Crew / Land’s End option, as soon as I saw a pair in Forever 21’s (new?) men’s section, I knew it would have, have, have to be those.

But since I didn’t want to stand around & get scolded like a teenager on line all evening, I came home and ordered them via the web site, along with an assortment of “boyshorts” for myself, and in retrospect? I wouldn’t have ordered them at all if I’d know that by “boyshort” they meant “pseudo-boyshort with hidden, non-removable thong element.” But then again, I should have known better than to attempt purchasing undergarments at a store geared toward pro-Anna victims.

The boy loves his shorts, though, and they look exactly as biscuity on him as I knew they would. And the purchase was definitely worth having a giant FOREVER 21 box — with, like, my full name repeated in bold italics, and hearts and stars printed all over it — dropped off conspicuously on my empty chair in the middle of my office in plain sight of everyone who walks by, on the one day I was out.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to date a contemporary, which has only really ever happened once in my adult life, and briefly. In recent (god, I guess it was about half a decade ago, though) times my one Contemporary Boyfriend was Aimee Plumley, or — for those of you unaware of whom I mean — Brian Bernbaum.

Brian was (and is) a writer, and I’m a writer, and therefore we should have lived happily every after, n’est-ce pas? Not so much, and it wasn’t just that my sister’s lifelong dating of multiple consecutive Brians was always in the back of my mind. We were around the same age — he was actually (gasp!) a couple years my junior — so we could reminisce about all the same television programs and cafeteria lunch selections and, you know, Dance Party U.S.A. contestants. I don’t know if we ever did, per se, but we could have!

The point was that we were Contemporaries. Marie pointed it out to me, actually. “It’s so cool that you’re dating your contemporary,” she said. I’d never thought about it — I’d just sort of viewed all dateable boys as my contemporaries — but it was true, and I loved the sound of it! “My boyfriend? Oh yeah, he’s my contemporary, it’s great!” That’s what I would tell people if they asked, but of course nobody ever did, since nobody apart from Marie & I assigns value to that sort of thing, to the extreme of, like, quitting our day jobs and self-publishing chapbooks about it.

For some reason, ever since then I’ve almost exclusively dated significantly older boys, and I think part of the reason for that is I discovered — perhaps subconsciously at the time — that my Contemporaries (while male!) were also living paycheck to paycheck with multiple roommates and scraping by on Ramen… which is of course the noble thing to do! But at the same time, what halfway respectable twentysomething gal moves to New York City without at least trying to locate that older, somewhat more knowledgeable, five o’clock-shadowed horn-rimmed-bespectacled writer who’s already carved himself out a niche in the form of, say, the SoHo lofts that were readily available for peanuts in the 80s?

Of course, that guy doesn’t exist — or, if he does, he marries within his class — but as a wise fellow member of my Black-Dirt Polish sistren, Marie Slesinski, famously quoted in her senior write-up: Life’s a journey, not a destination. The joy is in the quest. And don’t get me wrong, you can come close to the mythical post-collegiate tweed-jacketed professor affair: in fact, I think I’ve come as close as is possible without actually doing anything illegal. My current boyfriend fits the description closely enough; he had me at that first heartfelt rant on the New Yorker’s excessive umlaut usage, for christ’s sake. But every once in awhile, I wonder what it would be like to date someone who wasn’t in college when Saved By the Bell premiered. Every once in awhile I want someone to reminisce about The Magic Garden and Paula Abdul videos with.

And every once in awhile, I wonder how much less painful it would be to date someone whose wandering eye strays to dewy, ripe-for-the-pickin’ thangs of a younger age group than his girlfriend’s, instead of looking past what’s right in front of his face to check out the free & single, carefree & uninhibited exact replicas thereof… had his girlfriend not taken herself off the market prematurely to be in a relationship with him. Every once in awhile I wonder what it would be like to grow old alongside someone as part of a team of two equals, rather than a decade behind chronologically — but a decade ahead societally and mentally, since men are viewed as better-looking over time and don’t grow up ’til they’re 45.

Every once in awhile I wish I could say, “Oh, him? Yeah, we’re a good team — we’re contemporaries. We’re in this together.” Of course nobody would ever actually utter those words outside of an afterschool special, but I kinda feel like it would beat sitting around not getting 70s references. It might even beat not being able to talk about 90s afterschool specials.

And I wonder if it would beat missing out on an entire decade of being ogled by other girls’ forty year-old boyfriends. You know, like the very decade my female contemporaries are enjoying?