Overlap

I just finish reading Prospect Park West.  It was not really about Prospect Park West, it was about Carroll Street between 8th Ave and Prospect Park West.  That block is really close to my building.  Without actually telling The Internets where I live I can say it is really close, so close that I often park my car on that block.

While most of the books action takes places that I am intimately familiar with, The Park Slope Food Coop, PS 321, (the school my kids just completed), and  Prospect Park.  Also all the streets that go around my block were all mentioned by name in the book.  I ate in all of the restaurants the characters ate in too.  Characters ran the loop of Prospect Park and it was described in accurate detail

I share some real life the the author, too, Amy Sohn is Facebook friends with some of my actual friends. She is also a member of the Coop and blogged about an event I attended last week.  We have probably met, or at least interacted in a non-memorable way.

But the book is not about me, or the life I have in Park Slope.  It is about celebratory worship and under sexed housewives.  I don't know these people.  I thought maybe there would be a character in the book I could relate to. Notsomuch.  No Stay at Home Dad.  No random running guy.  Not much men at all.

But there was a little chapter that was inserted into the end of the book that really had little to do with the plot.  Just one page that was the story of Warren Tofsky.  It is a little story of a perfectly happy man, who goes for a bike ride and was killed in an accident  at the intersection of the street I live on and Carroll St.  The entire chapter can be read here.  He happened to be the father of twins.

In reality, Jonathan Millstein died when his bike collided with a school bus a block closer to my home.  I happened in the morning too..  I know that because his body was still there we went to go to school.

They painted an outline of a dead man where he died.

I don't know if the recent repaving makes it look better or worse