"How the hell did you end up in Bensonhurst?" someone recently asked me, his face screaming: "this-makes-no-logical-sense."

"It's a long story..." I began, promptly giving him the truncated version of my move from the suburbia of Troy, Michigan, after graduating high school back in 1988. 

I landed cleanly -- well, I probably could have used a shower (it was 87 degrees and I was lugging around my heaviest leather jacket) -- at Port Authority.   After immediately being scammed out of 20 bucks, I wove my way to the Lower East Side to begin my new life which was complete with  summer riots in Tompkins Square Park, plenty of can-collecting and bar hopping, and a feeble attempt at selling hand-painted (with magic marker) ash trays made out of abandoned junk.

I resided in a number of places, before moving to Brooklyn.  (A more comprehensive account of this story will be found in my autobiography, due out in 56 years or right after I write it, whichever comes first.) I did not go gently into Brooklyn, but was dragged kicking and screaming.  My roommate and I had been jumping around from overpriced sublet to disgusting hovel and he finally found a place on Bergen Street.  "It's only one stop over the bridge, Ryn," he had tried to console me (actually two).  "It'll be just like living in Manhattan." 

Why I was so adamant against moving to Brooklyn I don't know.   Perhaps because I would lose that "New York, New York" part of my mailing address that I had come to love (not that anyone mailed me anything at the time, anyway). Perhaps I felt that Brooklyn was "uncool" and I would rather live near what I thought was the heartbeat of the city, Alphabet City.  Maybe I was scared of the "unknown" -- which doesn't make any sense since I hopped on a Greyhound all the way to NYC.  So why should I be scared of two more subway stops on the F train?

Whatever the reason, here I am -- over ten years later -- in this Borough of Churches, where I have lived in at least five different dwellings.  Two were grotesque, one was a roach hole, and the remaining were pretty damn nice.   Almost all have been in Bensonhurst  because that's where my boyfriend, Mickey,  was born and raised.  He knew the area and the rent was right and the rest is history. 

My boyfriend isn't your stereotypical Brooklynite, however.  Although he comes from a four-family, long-standing house his grandmother owned near 18th Avenue, he doesn't say "Yo!" and sometimes people ask him where he is from. 

Of course over the years, Bensonhurst has gone through many mutations from its Saturday Night Fever days to the diversified manifestation it has become.   Its bakeries are metamorphosing from Italian to Chinese and you can't walk a block without finding something Russian.  Personally, the change has not affected me much.   We have pretty much lived on the fringe of the neighborhood, anyway, and I do not fit in with any particular ethnicity in the neighborhood.  People can never guess what my background is, sometimes even after hearing my last name.  They often guess that I am Jewish and someone once even thought I came from Ireland.  Overall, however, I find Brooklyn to be quite a pleasing experience.  And not as remote as I originally believed.  It's featured in many movies.  And publications like Brooklyn Bridge magazine highlight its diversity and cultural events.  I’ve worked at a local Brooklyn paper for several years, where I’ve learned the ins and outs of this sprawling borough and what community activists are great to contact -- and those you should avoid (e.g. no names given but it is rumored that he fire-bombed his own car for attention).  It’s been a crash course in Brooklyn history and   more than enough to give me thorough knowledge of the borough even though I wasn't born here.

People immediately know I am not from Brooklyn.  For one, I don’t have an accent.  Also, I don't prop my foot up behind me and lean back when I stand, a dead-giveaway Brooklyn stance.  "You can spot someone from Brooklyn a mile away," Mickey tells me, “it's a universal thing.” Once Mickey was in Hawaii, doing the foot propping thing, and a guy came up to him and said “you're from Brooklyn, aren't you?"  

I have also often heard that "Brooklyn is a state of mind." Although I am not a native of this borough, a potential employer, analyzing my resume, put it this way, "You're a Brooklynite by association and education."  I’ve lived here long enough and  I’ve spent close to a decade working on two degrees from Brooklyn College.

So I guess that's true.  But, no, I did not look at a map of the world and stick a yellow pin in Bensonhurst and say to myself, "This is where I am going to end up in ten years."  I did not calculate that I would have ever actually traveled to (or even heard of) the likes of Park Slope, Coney Island or the woefully worrisome Sheepshead Bay.  Maybe one day, when  someone asks me where I'm from, I'll readily answer "Brooklyn" and be able to leave it at that.  Still, I have my doubts.

How long must you live somewhere before you can say that's where you're from?  Maybe I'll figure that out in another ten years.

Also check out: Deborah Au-Yeung's  D.U.M.B.O. (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass section of Brooklyn) column.