Finding the Target in Brooklyn

Yesterday, Ometepe comes to an end and I am translado almost instantly from the sun kissed dust and smiles of Nicaragua to cold gray granite JFK airport.  Our flight arrives at 3am, but I am awakened before that because my seatmate has a problem.  My seatmates always seem to have problems on the night flights, and they are invariably large strong men.  This one has the build of Mike Tyson, but can’t take the air bumps, starts sweating profusely and having shortness of breath when we are 1 hr. outside NYC.  They decide to administer oxygen so move me to first class to get me out of the way.  Sounds great, but I didn’t sleep at all because of the whole drama.

The most important thing about my 8 hour layover at JFK was a trip I’d plotted and planned for months.  It was my second place aspiration for 2011. 

This year, on my self-evaluation at work, there was a section for career aspirations.  I left it blank.  After years of working and responsibilities, my real aspiration is to take four months off, stay with my parents on Bainbridge, and be a stay at home mom.  After that, or my aspiration for March 2011, was to go to Target and go shopping (by myself…mom readers can fully relate!).  When you live in Mozambique and haven’t been able to leave much for the last 8 months, going shopping in the US can easily become an aspiration… and an obsession.

 I had a running shopping list over the last 6 months.  All the things that are impossible to get in Moz (gummy vitamins, Ranch dressing packets, my annual dose of Peeps!, make-up that doesn’t make me look like a drag queen, TORTILLAS) or the things that are ridiculously expensive in Moz (dog leash, $40 in Moz), (ibuprofen, only $6.09 at Target for 250 pills!), (Ben Ten action figure, $8.44 at Target and $45 in Moz).   All these made the list.

But the trip was going to be tricky because I got into JFK at 3am and my flight left at 11am, and as hard as I tried cruising the net, I couldn’t find the closest Target to JFK that opened at a reasonable hour.  When I arrived at 3am, I asked the Arabic speaking information desk person… he had no idea, but still made something up.  And the Jamaican policeman standing next to him told me all the Targets were too far, didn’t open until 10 AND I would miss my flight.  ‘Forget it.  Twill not work.’ So I asked the Trinidadian lady who came through the door primped up for her flight to Port of Spain.  And then I asked the Dominican cleaning lady.  And then I asked the lady at the baggage storage.  To each of them I had to explain why I ASPIRED, dreamed of going to Target on a cold NY morning.  They all gave me different answers on where I might find this Target, and so, resigned, I tried to sleep. 

But if any of you know JFK terminal 4, there is NO place to sleep.  There are only the phone booths.  So I tried that, but kept getting interrupted by the homeless man snoring in the booth on the other side.  I was still determined though—to prove the Arab information guy and the Jamaican policeman wrong. 

Finally, I bought 4 minutes of internet and Googled:  Target Brooklyn Hours.  Yes!  There was a Target near the airport that opened at 8… and this matched the Trinidad lady’s instructions.  Finally, with two sets of instructions that matched, I decided to wait in the phone booth until 7:30, then get the Yellow Cab and go for it.  I told the cab driver the address and he nodded.  That’s supposed to mean he knows where he’s going, but not 2 minutes later, he is parked on the shoulder of the Belt Parkway, yelling at some guy named Hamid on the phone in Arabic, trying to figure out where the Target is.  I don’t speak Arabic, but didn’t need to.

‘It not come up on GPS. Hamid don’t know and Hamid know Brooklyn.’ 

So we just sit there.  Then he starts driving again, and I ask in an unconcealable worried tone, ‘But if you don’t know where the Target is, where are you taking me?’ 

‘I take you anywhere you want to go. Customer first.  I know Queens, no Brooklyn.’

I was worried.

‘But I’m not from here … never been here, so I really don’t know where anything is, but I really need to go to Target.’

‘Why you need Target?’ 

‘Because I live in Mozambique and need to buy shoes and shorts and other things for my kids because these things are really expensive in Mozambique.’

He smiles very big and I can tell we now have a bond. 

‘You live in Africa!?  I am from Egypt, so I understand!  Africa is mess.  It  poor.’

He pulls over again on the Belt Parkway and starts re-entering the address in his GPS.  I hover over him to make sure he gets the spelling correct. 

In five minutes, we are there.  It’s Target, Bed, Bath and Beyond, Home Depot…spread before me, all rolled into one strip mall in Brooklyn, a mirage for an American from Mozambique, but it’s real.   

The Egyptian dumps me off.  I ask if I can call his cab company for a ride back.  He laughs, explaining that people in NY don’t do that.  ‘Good luck getting your flight…no cab come here.’ And off he goes. 

Target has just opened and I am privileged to be their first customer.  I take a moment to let the cold air enter my lungs and watch my breath exit on the way out.  Sigh.  It’s been over a year since I felt cold and it’s revitalizing, with the Gateway Target in Brooklyn awaiting me. 

The first thing I do is go talk to Bianca in customer service… initially, she looks at me like a have 3 heads.  ‘You need a cab to JFK airport in an hour?  From here?’

Yes, and then I explain the whole story again.  She thinks it’s funny and agrees to call a cab for me because I don’t have a cell phone.  I whip out my tattered 6 month old list and am exhilarated about experiencing Target for 1 hour, only a blip on the screen of time.  It is empty and all mine… and everything is familiar, for the Gateway Brooklyn Target has the same layout and feeling as the PG Plaza Target or the Eden Prairie Target or the Academy Blvd. Target. I have grown up on Target and there is always comfort in the familiar, even with its loud red bull’s eye and glaring fluorescent lights. 

I love Mozambique, but I will always be a foreigner there…I didn’t grow up there, so though I am used to it and like it , it can never be my true home.  I will never know Mozambican culture in the sense that I know all the minutiae and idiosyncrasies of American culture.  In Portuguese and Spanish, there are two words for know—saber, which means to know facts and where things are, what time it is, and conocer, which is to know people, what a place is like, to be familiar with something all the way down to your bones.  Conocer is  that part of knowing that can’t be clearly articulated, but is simply felt.  Familiar is the closest word to conocer in English, like family, but the way we use familiar doesn’t express the depth of conocer, because while I can say that I don’t know where the Brooklyn Target is located, I know the Brooklyn Target.  I truly know… conocer…my country and how it operates.  I understand the details because I am American.  That is why I can pull off an early morning trip to Brooklyn, stock up on everything I need for the next 4 months, fit is all into my bag and make it back to JFK in time, all in 1.5 hours. It’s because I know how all the gears fit together and how to make them move.  I know how to talk to Bianca so she will call me a cab.  I know the dog collars are next to the aisle with the Ziploc bags.  I know how to deal with the cashier so she will be expeditious and help me.  There are some very comforting things about being in one’s own country.

When I get to the cashier, I pull out my pink duffel bag, smile, and tell her no plastic bags are needed because all this stuff is going on the plane at JFK.  She looks at me like I’m just another weirdo, so I feel the need to justify, explain again. 

‘I know you might think I’m just another weirdo, but I Iive in Africa, and these  things are expensive there and they don’t have some things my kids really like and….’

She smiles a nice soft sympathetic smile- whoever said that people from Brooklyn were harsh and abrupt.  These people are my red target angels. 

‘You mean, they don’t have a Target in Africa?’

‘No, and in Mozambique, no MacDonald’s.’

‘Oh man, that must be really hard for your kids…. Coming from the US.’

‘They’re happy, but they miss some things..’

I rip all the boxes off the Wheat Thins, gummy vitamins, Ibuprofen, Oil of Olay moisturizer, throw the Converse shoe box in the trash to save space, and cram, mold and coax it all into the pink duffel.  Only the castle jigsaw puzzle doesn’t fit.  2 minutes after I get outside, my cab pulls up to take me back to JFK.  I have proven the Jamaican policeman wrong.

Target booty