Jen White, Candidate for Nyack Village Board
Last night, for the first time in my life, I marched in a parade. I walked through the crowded streets of Nyack, holding a poster with a picture of myself and my friend Doug Foster, as one more way, in this campaign period of wandering door to door, to see the voters of Nyack, one last time. As I walked, I was stunned at how many happy faces filled our streets. People I know because we all have kids the same age like Korliss Uecker and Jerry Grossman or Lena Madsen and Louis Rampersad, or people I have worked with in service to the Village like Minerva Parker and Marie Lorenzini.
People who’ve helped fix my home, like Marie Palmer whose husband Scott turned our nightmare kitchen into a dream, or fixed my kids like my pediatrician Ken Zatz . Victor Overton who keeps our streets clean and our trash picked up. Neighbors like Heidi Broecking and Steve Knowlton or folks from around the block like Emily Feiner and Chris Blair. Merchants like Gina from Casa, Rosanno from Lanterna, Matt from the Hudson House and Jimmy from the Skylark. Carlo Pelligrini who brought the circus to town and organized the Halloween parade gave me a high five and Dave Zornow, who runs this very web site, a grin. People I know from from Upper Nyack and South Nyack and Valley Cottage. And kids, oodles of kids whom I’ve watched grow from babies on the playground in Memorial Park to packs of “Trick or Treaters” wandering the streets of our Village on their own. I had sent my own eleven year old into the night accompanied by his friend Pierre who was celebrating his first real American “Trick or Treat” having moved here not long ago from Haiti.
The longer I walked that short quarter mile, the bigger my smile became. Everyone was happy, the streets were bustling, the Village looked beautiful. In front of me, the East Ramapo Marching band was swinging wildly, behind me a float from Elmwood overflowed with kids and adults. I began the march, somewhat harried, having fed the neighborhood pre-parade spaghetti, dressed my boys in their costumes and rushed to meet Doug in town for this last bit of campaigning. By the time I reached the parade end, I understood, more clearly than in all the months since deciding to seek office, why running this race for Nyack Trustee was important to me.
We live in an amazing place, a community full of decent hardworking people who deserve to be the kind of proud and happy we all were last night. It is a unique place where standing side by side and cheering parade ingenuity are pediatricians and opera singers and plumbers and lawyers, landscapers and restaurant owners and stay at home mothers and people who work in the movies. Kids who’ve arrived from Haiti “Trick or Treat” with kids born in Manhattan and kids who can trace their Nyack lineage back generations. . Last night the restaurants were full, and the Village glowed, a bit from Halloween, a bit from the end of day light that signals Fall on the amazing Hudson and a bit from the smiles on everyone’s face. It is because of these smiles that I am running for office. It is the desire to restore that feeling of joy and pride to our village every day. To know that when you say you live in Nyack you are saying something that makes you proud. For it’s character, it’s cleanliness, it’s quirkiness and it’s kindness to visitors. A place that people want to visit and those of us who live here, want to stay forever. A place that needs some attention to be all that it should but is far from lost. I want to give Nyack that attention, to help work to restore it to that place that was there, in all it’s glory, last night during the parade. It should be that way every day.
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