Brooklyn bouillabaisse

For over 21 years, I’ve been a Brooklyn mom.

That’s meant lots of things — kids who could recite every stop on the Brighton line, in order, by the age of 2-and-a-half; kids whose coming of age took place in blacktop playgrounds where broken bottles in the tree pits played the role of buried treasure; and, most of all, kids who became citizens of the world, with all its shades and nuances, at a very young age.

Even before either of my two kids headed off to pre-K, and plunged into the borough’s public school system, they got to know and play with kids who didn’t look at all like them at a drop-in center at a local church. They don’t remember the gorgeous Tiffany windows in the church’s sanctuary, but they do remember the friends they made. And, because they got to know youngsters of so many different ethnicities, creeds and cultures at a very young age, they didn’t even notice superficial differences.

Truly, they imbibed a sense of internationalism naturally, almost with their earliest gulps of mother’s milk.

And it was amazing not just for them, but for all of us who had the privilege of sharing their upbringing.

Our house took on the appearance of a mini-United Nations every time they had a party or a play date, a resemblance that only increased as elementary school segued into middle school, and then into high school. When they visited friends’ homes, they were immersed in vastly different cultures, tasting foods they had never imagined, and sharing their own unique perspectives on it all.

My daughter never stopped singing the praises of the exotic things she tasted at friends’ homes; she sampled it all — hearty Russian soups, Asian noodle dishes with ingredients she couldn’t identify, jerk chicken grilled up by our next-door neighbors, who never hesitated to stop by with a container of curried chicken for me because they knew how much I like the scent and savor of the spices they used.

A metaphor for the experience we all shared could easily be found on almost every street corner near our Flatbush home — on blocks where Pakistani bakeries are cheek-by-jowl with Mexican groceries, where glatt kosher falafel places are located across the street from halal groceries, and in stores where the bread aisle alone shows the breadth of diversity, pita bread next to chapatis, next to Russian brown bread, next to foccaccia.

There is no question that being in the heart of the borough’s melting pot shaped my children’s perceptions, their expectations and their values. Equality was their birthright. They have gone into the world knowing how large it is, and their horizons have continued to expand as they have grown.

But, exactly how important my children’s upbringing was became clear when it was time for my daughter, who graduated several years ago from Edward R. Murrow High School, to select a college.

As the date of her decision neared, we visited a bevy of campuses out of town, and, while she saw things she liked at all, something always seemed to be missing.

Ultimately, she opted for a branch of the City University. Why? Visits to two very desirable schools upstate, and another in Washington, D.C,, made the advantages of living in the city clear to her.

“I just couldn’t go to a school that wasn’t as diverse as Murrow,” she confessed before deciding on Hunter College where, for the past three years, she has extended her Brooklyn experience.

She’s not yet 22, and already she has visited five continents. And, with her Brooklyn background to sustain her, I know she is just at the beginning of a long journey in which she will see and experience many new things as she strives to make the world just a little bit more compact, and perhaps just a little bit more like the world in which she was privileged to grow up — Brooklyn.