Brunch Picture Quotes

He expected pages and pages of bright pictures of pancakes of every variety shown in plain stacks, or built into castles or bridges or igloos, or shaped like airplanes or rowboats or fire engines. And pitchers of syrup to choose from -- partridge berry syrup, thimbleberry syrup, huckleberry syrup, bosenberry syrup, and raspberry syrup. Then there would be cheese plates and cheeses a la carte. Creamy cheeses, crumbly cheeses, and peculiar little cheeses in peculiar little clay pots.

Her Instagram feed filled up with gorgeous photos of her creations displayed alongside books, some of their links tenuous at best. Double chocolate cookies made with huge chunks of Valrhona chocolate found their American-Parisian mash-up reference in Alcott's Little Women. Currant cinnamon rolls as big as a baby's head were paired with The Secret Garden. Her lemon-blueberry muffins posed alongside a favorite childhood picture book, Blueberries For Sal.

I met them in Minneapolis when the Society hosted a brunch for this year's winners and gave us these oversized checks they had us pose with. The picture made the front page of the Le Sueur News Herald. It was really embarrassing because I'm smiling with my eyes shut. And if that wasn't bad enough, Russ made a huge copy of the photo, replacing the background with a highway scene and the check I was holding with a sign that said NEED RIDE TO STAR TREK CONVENTION.

I was Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful. Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful meant Friday evenings downstairs at Savoy in the Strip District, and perhaps a table upstairs if it was your birthday. It meant Alpha and Que boat rides, NEED Scholarship dinners, and Ronald H. Brown Leadership Awards galas. It meant a stint on the Urban League Young Professionals executive board. It meant brunches at the LeMont on Mother’s Day and the Grand Concourse when you wanted to stunt. It meant frequent pictures in the Post-Gazette and the City Paper

I pull into the driveway outside of my father's house and shut off the engine. I sit behind the wheel for a moment, studying the house. He'd called me last night and demanded that I come over for dinner tonight. Didn't request. He demanded. What struck me though, was that he sounded a lot more stressed out and harried than he did when he interrupted my brunch with Gabby to demand my presence at a “family”dinner. Yeah, that had been a fun night filled with my father and Ian badgering me about my job. For whatever reason, they'd felt compelled to make a concerted effort to belittle what I do –more so than they usually do anyway -- try to undermine my confidence in my ability to teach, and all but demand that I quit and come to work for my father's company. That had been annoying, and although they were more insistent than normal, it's pretty par for the course with those two. They always think they know what's best for me and have no qualms about telling me how to live my life. When he'd called me last night though, and told me to come to dinner tonight, there was something in my father's voice that had rattled me. It took me a while to put a finger on what it was I heard in his voice, but when I figured it out, it really shook me. I heard fear. Outright fear. My father isn't a man who fears much or is easily intimidated. In fact, he's usually the one doing the intimidating. But, something has him really spooked and even though we don't always see eye-to-eye or get along, hearing that fear in his voice scared me. In all my years, I've never known him to sound so downright terrified. With a sigh and a deep sense of foreboding, I climb out of my car and head to the door, trying to steel myself more with each step. Call me psychic, but I have a feeling that this is going to be a long, miserable night. “Good evening, Miss Holly,”Gloria says as she opens the door before I even have a chance to knock. “Nice to see you again.”“It's nice to see you too, Gloria,”I say and smile with genuine affection. Gloria has been with our family for as far back as I can remember. Honestly, after my mother passed away from ovarian cancer, Gloria took a large role in raising me. My father had plunged himself into his work –and had taken Ian under his wing to help groom him to take over the empire one day –leaving me to more or less fend for myself. It was like I was a secondary consideration to them. Because I'm a girl and not part of the testosterone-rich world of construction, neither my father nor Ian took much interest in me or my life. Unless they needed something from me, of course. The only time they really paid any attention to me was when they needed me to pose for family pictures for company literature.

Brooklyn, like the West Village, again makes me think of gentrification's ability to erase collective memory. I cannot imagine what people who aren't from New York think when they move to Brooklyn. Do they know they're moving into neighborhoods where just ten years ago you wouldn't have seen a white person at any time of day? Do they know that every apartment listed on Craigslist as 'newly renovated' was once inhabited by someone else who likely made a life there before the ground under their feet became too valuable? It's hard not to feel guilt living here, and I wonder if other gentrifiers feel the same way. I represent the domino effect. I was priced out of Manhattan, but I know my existence in this borough comes at the cost of the erasure of others' cultures and senses of home. I know the woman with the Gucci bag in the West Village elicits the same kind of angst within me as my presence does for a native Brooklynite. I try to stay away from the hippest joints and I try to support long-established businesses, but I often fail at doing these things, and I know that even when I'm successful at trekking this increasingly narrow path, I've only done so much. Brooklyn, like the West Village, is irrevocably changed, and I know I'm part of that. The question is, how do I stop it when the process is so much larger than me and has already progressed so far? Mass displacement means that there are fewer and fewer people coming to Brooklyn now know only that it's hip and expensive and has good brunch. As Sarah Schulman writes, gentrifiers 'look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world.' It's a circular logic that dictates Brooklyn is Brooklyn because it's Brooklyn - the brand mimicked by hipsters all over the world and mocked in hundreds of tired late-night parodies. What gentrifier sees Brooklyn not as it is but as the consequence of a powerful and violent system?

At this very moment, Harris Blanchard is happily brunching with his parents in New York City or enjoying the company of his fellow seniors or hiking or skiing and posting pictures on Instagram, his grinning face behind a pair of enormous goggles as he enjoys these final weeks of winter break. My daughter—the lack of her—is the last thing on his mind.