For
even if your visitor should find Bowdoin Place, many streets in Brooklyn
have two, three, or four systems of numbering. Some will maintain that
it is not rigidly honest to give a stranger your Brooklyn address
without giving him detailed directions for finding his way from the
station, illustrating your argument with a sketch map. But there will
always be Puritan consciences.
As a matter of fact, some of the kindest and most enlightened people I
know live in Brooklyn. And I cannot see why that in itself should make
them a subject for general satire. I have been told that a professor at
Harvard has recently made the calculation that the drama and the art of
conversation in America would be poorer by 33-1/3 per cent. if the joke
about living in Brooklyn were to disappear. When a visitor from
Brooklyn drops in unexpectedly at a Harlem flat, the proper thing for
the host to say is, "Well, well, what a task it must have been to find
your way out," and when the visitor starts for home his host remarks,
"Sorry you can't stay; but we all know how it is--in the midst of life
you are in Brooklyn.
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