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By ADRIAN NICOLE LeBLANC

Originally published in The New York Times, February 1, 2004. Reprinted with permission from The New York Times.

IT seems significant that on one of my first outings to the South Bronx, I couldn't find my way back home. I lived in Chelsea then, and I was still new to New York. I worked days as an editor at Seventeen magazine and did my freelance reporting at night. The Village Voice had assigned me a piece on drug dealers' girlfriends. I borrowed a friend's clunking car to take some of the girls clubbing. Entering a pool hall on the Grand Concourse, I had my first experience of being frisked. It was after 4 A.M. when I dropped off the last girl. The rain dumped down.

Back then, in the early 90's, the South Bronx still seemed to me like the iconic ghetto it was purported to be; that night, as I drove up and down its desolate boulevards, the shapes of the ordinary world disappeared. All I saw beyond the fogging windshield was threat. No hint of the pace of well-lit, clipped Manhattan. Rain slashed the signs of unfamiliar streets. Elevated subway tracks loomed overhead. At a gas station, I anxiously left the car to ask directions, but my questions got drowned out by the pleas of the Indian attendant, barricaded in behind his bars, urgently waving me, please, away.

My own fear increased with the resulting chill. Eventually, I was flying by the Whitestone Cinema, headed east. Blessedly, I spotted the "New England Thruway" sign, a friendly highway green.

Originally, I come from Leominster, in northern Massachusetts. Absurdly, I seriously considered driving the four hours home. In a panic, one reverts to what one knows. At least from Leominster, I knew my way back to New York. What I wouldn't realize for another decade was that the homecoming would ultimately occur the other way around: the pull of the Bronx, and the connection to the family I found there, not the fear of it, would carry me home to my blood family.

Only now, a year after its publication, is the full meaning of the title of my first book, "Random Family," revealing itself to me. The book documents more than a decade in the life of one extended family from the South Bronx. Had I been asked midway through the reporting what the title meant, I might have answered, "The families my subjects inherited and those they chose" or "The family that teenagers create among their friends."

But from where I stand now, I'd say that a sense of belonging can also spring from a geographical affinity, the comfort we feel in places both known and discovered or, in some cases, the places that are within us even before we arrive, their streets coursing through our personal histories.

MY strongest early memories of my father involve him driving away. Off he'd go, in the orange pumpkin, our nickname for the rust-colored American Ambassador supplied by the union when he left a chemical factory job and turned to organizing full time. My father drove to faraway destinations -- Pittsburgh, Akron, Detroit -- and returned with exotic tales infused with the urgency of the mundane world, compelling stories about regular people struggling to make ends meet.

Once we spent a family holiday at a roadside Ramada Inn in Delaware. While my mother sunned by the pool, I trailed Edie, an elderly maid whose gentle presence made my father's hotel room a home. Edie let me refill the vending machine with miniature toothbrushes, their silver tubes of toothpaste as slim and shiny as smelts. She let me push her tidy hallway cart. In the sweet-smelling laundry closet, which doubled as her office, we counted her tips.

As I was growing up, my mother liked to tell me that every woman needs an education and a car. (The education was something no one could ever take away from you, while a car could take you away from anywhere you suddenly didn't want to be.) After high school, I was always driving away -- for college, for graduate school, on assignment, back to my apartment in New York.

Like my father's, my visits home were brief; I was using my education the way I was supposed to, to escape the working class that my ambitious mother had found herself trapped in. She devoted her life to making my escape possible, struggling to balance her love without letting me feel entirely at home. But if I wanted to succeed -- whatever that meant -- I couldn't stop moving. Irrationally, I worried that if I ever slowed down, or slipped up, I'd somehow end up on my father's old slot on the assembly line.

When I started my reporting in the Bronx, however, suddenly I was like my father with his union: I knew that this was the work I wanted to do. I felt a sense of purpose, energized and fully alive. The work drew on my deepest self, yet, unlike the elite worlds to which my education exposed me, didn't require that I bury my working-class alliances.

In fact, those initial nights of reporting -- listening to music and watching the girls dress up to go dancing, hanging out in front of bodegas and in courtyards and on stoops, driving around as they shouted out of the car to the windows of the boys they liked -- took me back to an earlier time. It was a lot like my teenage years with my hometown friends, aimless and open-ended, not about the things we didn't have, or some distant future, but about the vitality and wonder of the life that was already ours, and within our reach.

It turns out I wasn't the first of my relatives to do time in the Bronx. Not long after I began serious work on my book, I called my mother from the pay phone of a cafe in the Italian neighborhood of Belmont. "I don't know why," I told her, "I feel so at home here." I supposed it was the familiarity of the Italians on Arthur Avenue. My mother neglected to mention that her parents had lived there for a decade before moving to Leominster, where, not long after, my grandfather died. It would be years before an uncle, in an emotional moment after a family funeral, confessed that the greatest love story in my family's history had taken place in that neighborhood - perhaps the site of the loss of promise the most painful to bear.

My mother's father rented a room as a boarder from my grandmother's older sister, who had come from a neighboring village in Italy. He saw my grandmother 's photograph, and they started corresponding; he dictated his letters because he didn't know how to write. Eventually, he helped pay her passage; her younger brother, Orazio, escorted her. There was a swoon after the first kiss in Central Park, another legendary kiss in the stairwell of the sister's house.

Six months later, on Oct. 8, 1905, the Rev. Thomas T. Lynch officiated at the marriage at St. Elizabeth's Roman Catholic Church in Washington Heights. My grandmother liked to tell my mother how she looked like a princess that day, dressed in white, perched atop a carriage driven by six white horses that delivered her to the church. She was adorned in jewelry, including a gold chain that my grandfather had given her and a bracelet, etched with a delicate scroll. Over her heart, she pinned a bird with four tiny pearls, two on each wing, and a ruby balanced on its beak.

It was a hopeful beginning, but things got harder quickly. As my grandmother began having children, nine in all, my grandfather took whatever work he could find -- lighting lamps, maintenance, delivering coal. For a time, he was a superintendent in a building in Belmont, just two blocks away from Thorpe house, the homeless shelter on Crotona Avenue where, 90 years later, I would be spending my weekends and nights.

By then, I'd met Lolli, the young woman who would become one of my primary subjects (and who is identified as Coco in my book). In the restroom at Seventeen, I'd slip out of my black blazer and miniskirt at the end of my work day and put on a T-shirt and jeans. We happily explored her Bronx streets, pointing out our favorites among the trays of gold medallions and door-knocker earrings in the jewelry shops on Fordham Road; admiring the dusty baby shower cakes decorated with miniature pacifiers in the window of the cuchifrito-bakery on Burnside Avenue; watching the bright fake fish that paddled spastic laps in a plastic aquarium at the dollar store.

On Mount Hope Place, where her first love had lived before he went to prison, Lolli showed me the graffiti heart she'd etched into the wall of a stairwell where they used to kiss. One Sunday morning, on Tremont Avenue, we waved to a young bride and groom gleefully shouting from the sun roof of a white stretch limousine.

I gradually realized, however, that Lolli had never ventured the few blocks from her Puerto Rican neighborhood to the Italian section. So one afternoon, when her 3-year-old daughter was hungry, I suggested lunch on Arthur Avenue. I was slowly becoming a familiar face on the street; the bakery clerk nodded hello, and the butcher at the Arthur Avenue Market tutored me about what to look for in a proper cut of beef.

Lolli was uncharacteristically reluctant as we stepped into a coffee shop where I'd been a few times. Helping her daughter climb onto a stool, she stood behind her, pressing her pregnant belly against the little girl's back so she wouldn't topple off. We waited while the waitress chatted with a customer at the far end of the counter. I asked for menus. It was 11 A.M. The short order cook was flipping eggs on the grill. From the opposite end of the room, without looking in our direction, the waitress said, "Kitchen's closed."

IN the meantime, I had moved to SoHo. I didn't find it an easy fit. On weekends, when it teemed with shoppers buying things I could never afford, I'd linger around the corner of Something Special, Lenny Cecere's small store on Macdougal, just to hear the banter of Italian men. On the rare days I didn't go to the Bronx, I'd head out to Coney Island, to stroll on the boardwalk among the old Russians, or to Bensonhurst, to eat panelle at Joe's of Avenue U. My apartment was rent-stabilized, so I couldn't think of leaving permanently, but it was more like a hotel than a home.

The parts of the Bronx that I was getting to know didn't require the same stretching. Uptown, on the sidewalk, in the Laundromat, at the Western Union office, my movements came naturally. What became taxing were the transitions.

I remember the day I realized that I had to leave my Midtown job. I'd spent a spate of nights out reporting in the Soundview projects, where the elevator doors rattled and ached, and that tired morning I was struck by the silence of my ascent at Seventeen. The bell for my floor gently sounded, and I stepped noiselessly off the elevator onto the red carpet that led to my office. I no longer knew what I was doing there.

Whenever I was downtown, which was less and less, I felt that life was elsewhere. Uptown, I was learning to surrender to the slower rhythms of my subjects' days. Ordinary acts absorbed me utterly. Even the most mundane things -- children playing, a trip to the grocery store, watching an old dog sleeping -- gave me a sense of discovery. After all, I was supposed to spend hours hanging out, observing. I started to crave the street. On the best days, I was keenly aware of the sensory environment but unaware of myself. I knew I was in precisely the right place, at the right time. Doing my work meant remaining still.

Like that of a child shuttling between divorced parents, my behavior changed with my surroundings: at a welfare office in the Bronx, I could be endlessly patient, numbed. Yet if I had to wait in line at the Gourmet Garage, I became irritable. Increasingly at ease in the places most white New Yorkers thought of as impossibly dangerous, I'd tense up at book parties and gallery openings. I preferred to brave the stairwell in a housing project than walk into a roof-top party. A college friend, now a psychologist, declared me counter-phobic. Possibly true, but what good do labels do?

But the greatest threat to my reporting wasn't the danger, which was erratic and unusual, but the frustrations and despair, which were relentless, pervading every task of daily life. In the Bronx, survival regularly felt impossible, escape unimaginable. Even hope became a risk.

Back in SoHo, I slept, a lot. I'm generally an early morning person, but I came to love the bed. I'd sleep a solid 12 hours after a prison visit, a whole day after a weekend in Lolli's mother's courtyard. One afternoon, one of the girls from the Bronx called to wake me; I used to be prompt, calling up to their windows, waking them. Now, I was late, I answered the telephone cranky. "You sound like my mother," she said critically.

Poverty is a climate. Within a few years, I had adapted to its weather's unpredictability: I stopped believing that institutions functioned in any reliable or useful fashion. I would be surprised, delighted, when anything went smoothly. I developed a sense of humor. I stopped wearing black, started wearing fuchsia. I became an optimist, and a fatalist. I cared more about my sex appeal. My downtown friends commented that I'd become more defensive, suspicious and sarcastic. My uptown friends told me I needed to gain weight and relax.

Surely some of this was a result of my immersion in my subjects' world, my experience of their profound economic and physical vulnerability. I wish I'd been strong enough to move to the Bronx and live in the spaces that, for 24 hours a day, filled my head.

MY own family's crisis took me back to Leominster; my father was found to have cancer. During the 18 months that I cared for my him, my city life receded; my hometown roots were renewed. Over the phone, my downtown friends expressed their worries about me: I needed to rest, I needed to eat, I needed to get back to New York. My Bronx friends told me to stay strong, to fight the terror, to try to make my father laugh, to fill the house with children. They'd shown me what my Italian ancestors had buried in their stoic formality. When it's not possible to protect the people you love and make things better, you grab onto the good moments when you can.

A Bronx friend, who had survived a spinal injury, coached my father through a similar trauma and gave me indispensable caretaking advice. Another friend, who worked as a home health aide, prepared me for what to expect as my father moved closer to death. Lolli and her children came to visit. ("You mad skinny," said her 9-year-old, taking in my father. "That's for sure," my father said.) As I watched Lolli holding my father's bony hand, I felt the reconnection of something broken running through my life. When my father passed, Lolli's mother told me to take care of my own. "Your mother's the only one you've got," she said.

Not so long ago, I returned to New York and reintroduced myself to my apartment and my neighborhood. I walked to the Angelika, became a morning regular at Once Upon a Tart, swam laps at a nearby pool. Photographs got framed, dinners cooked, walls painted. I moved into my place, then I got restless again. Nights, I reported a story about a rapper and drug dealer who lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I was back at work. Absorbed, I watched him get his weekly trim among the men debating politics at his barbershop. Sitting in the passenger seat of his S.U.V., flying down the low Brooklyn streets, windows open, his music blasting, looking out at the new neighborhood, I felt life pouring over me.

To be where I am is to accept where I came from, to be both a visitor and an escapee. Maybe always-leaving is my closest kinship, but I've learned to claim the life I live here, wherever that may be. The open invitation is what I cherish most about my work in this city -- the righteousness of my ignorance, the job of getting lost again and again.

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This piece is available in the following audio formats [11:31 min]:
		56 kbps Real Audio

		intro
		transcript

		Bios
		A Note on the Story
		Adrian Leon LeBlanc's Obituary
		Adrian Leon LeBlanc's Army Discharge Papers
		Photos of the LeBlanc Family
		Audio Extras
		Resources
		An article by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
		Q&A with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc: A Journalist Grapples with Grief
		Q&A with 'The Ground We Lived On' Producer Sarah Kramer

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