Broken Windows and Silver Doorknobs

Bad neighborhood. Sketchy. Rough area. Borderline. Ghetto. Have you heard any of these descriptions, however offensive they may strike you? Have you heard either more negative terms or their euphemistic replacements?

Come, take a walk with me.

No. Right now. Don't be afraid.

Observe this block. Schuyler Street. Take in the parade of two-story, two-family houses, built in the 1920s and '30s. Lawns manicured, adorned with daffodils, mulch, shrubs, trees. No litter. Structures not thirsting for paint or carpentry. Across the street, much the same: different architectural styles, smaller, more modest. Up the block, historic Myrtle Hill Cemetery. Graves dating to the 1800s, including that of a Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Several blocks distant, over on Milton Avenue, a house overrun by fallen maple limbs and uncut grass, by weeds, a house choked by its longtime neglect, its metal fence interweaved by sprawling hedge branches, an empty pack of Newport 100s, a discarded Brisk ice tea, a crumpled invoice for car repair, a lone latex glove. An official notice of condemnation posted on a window and door. Blue recycle bins, tires, broken trikes, and split-open trash bags on Herkimer and Emerson. And up the hill, on Pharis Street, overlooking city and suburbs, a pristine lawn with a sign warning against having your dog use the lawn as a private bathroom, in front of a pristine Arts and Crafts bungalow freshly painted yellow, brown, and black, with a shock of red on the door.

Care and neglect coexisting. Pride and privation. Gain and loss. A fabric of multicolored threads and textures, sewn and patched, stitched and shored up. Some more than others, some less, some not at all.

Let's walk some more, keep pace, stretch your stride, down the hill, toward the creek. Oh, you'd rather not, this is a "bad neighborhood"? Be brave. Suck it up. Trust me. Really.

True, that broken, rusted pickup in the driveway looks unsavory, so does the mosaic of tossed Burger King wrappers and soda cups. An eyesore. It makes my eyes sore.

But look across the street, that Victorian painted lady, emerald and cream with surprises of vermilion. Do you see its new siding, every storm window sparkling new, the shiny metal roof? The rebuilt porch? That house could pass for brand-new if you didn't know better.

I am sure this is obvious, but I can't help noting it: we are not dodging bullets, street-corner hustlers do not catch our eye, wondering if we covet their gaze and proffered wares.

Form your own conclusions, as you will. 

In my Age of Coronavirus walks, the gods and goddesses of surprise have been my tour guides.

Surprise, surprise.

If we look for broken windows, they appear. If we search for silver doorknobs, we find them.

p.s. Ever hear the expression "my mind is a bad neighborhood"? (It's popular in wellness and recovery circles and can possibly be traced to an Anne Lamott quotation, but its provenance is uncertain.) As with the physical neighborhoods described above, be careful what you look for. As Leonard Cohen suggested, "look among the garbage and the flowers." You never know what you will find.

ghost in the machine

It is 2018. Election Day. The Feast of Choices. I voted, made my choices. I had uncharacteristically backed into the parking space outside the Hazard branch library. I won't hazard here a guess as to the 5Ws and an H of the hazard. Turn the ignition. No push button. The engine starts. Wait. Hold it. I'm not ready but I'm rolling forward, sliding as if on black ice. I'm pushing down, down, down, pumping on the brake. To no avail. Huh? Hold it. Can't stop the forward motion, the inertia. Panic. Sweat. Brake. Brake. Wait. The car is in park. What? Oh. What? Hunh? The car to my right, parallel to me, doing the sliding, the gliding, the creeping forward. Rapid heartbeat slows. Reorients. Back to normal. Things in their proper place and time. Back to normal, whatever that is.

It is 1956. I know it is 1956 because later in the journey, after Mom, Dad, Jack, and I, and the Kandas visited Washington Crossing State Park in New Jersey, a mysterious conversation ensued in the car. "Are you okay, Josephine?" The dialogue among the adults was confusing. I was 7 years old. The words "morning sickness" were uttered that summer day in the car, in New Jersey, where at the Kandas' for vacation I would enjoy buttered and salted corn on the cob that has yet to equaled in sweet and salty succulence, a trip so satisfying I saved sand in a Dixie cup from Ocean County Park in Lakewood after wading in its tea-colored lake water. After Bobby was born, in January 1957, did I hearken back to Mom's car-sickness obliquely discussed? Doubtful. It was more of a mosaic, a gestalt portrait painted in stages over the years since.

It is 1956. We are on a train in Stamford, Connecticut, bound for Trenton, New Jersey, for a family vacation. One could only hazard a wild guess as to the costly burden this put on our family. We lived in a city housing project, well kept, reasonably safe. We moved there in 1955, part of a seismic postwar transformation unknown to the scared and curious kid in the front passenger seat with cousin Joe Kanda driving. How did six of us fit in the car? No bucket seats, no seat belts. We are on the train ready to embark on our adventure. Some kid in school (for all I know, it was a teacher not a classmate) once told a story of someone being sucked under a train and dying. So, when steam burst forth from the arriving New York, New Haven and Hartford line (the New Haven line; oh, how I would long for a gorgeous serial comma inserted there, seifs or not) engine, what else could I ponder but swift death and extinction by locomotive vacuuming? A terrifying prospect.

Not sucked under but alive, oh, the excitement of sitting in a train chugging toward Manhattan, solid and rhythmic, stoic and hypermuscled, iron in its will and movement. Passengers on a train, human cargo -- living and breathing after not being mercilessly sucked into its abdomen!

We arrived at the terminus of Grand Central Terminal (not Grand Central Station, which is a post office). Presumably to change trains for the Pennsylvania Railroad, a coveted ownership property in Monopoly.

I am sitting near the window, the window is on the right. We start moving slowly, pulling out of the station. We are underground. Here we go. A gentle rolling sends us toward Trenton. Wait. Something is wrong here. What's the train on the other side of my window doing? Going backward? I don't get it. I stamp my feet on the floor, as if I could step on my own personal braking system to set things right.

"Mommy? Daddy? What's the train do -- ... ?"

Did they see it too?

Some kind of secular miracle. Movement not movement. We weren't moving, the other train was. What's going on here? Did you catch that? Was that for me to see or does everyone see it? As if my beloved Willie Mays wasn't tracking the ball over his shoulder in center field but instead the outfield and the stands and naturally the batted ball were conspiring to move while he was stationary.

And a seven-year-old boy doesn't know where to begin so he swallows his words and buckles up, so to speak, for the ride.

Who or what authored this vection vision of illusory movement? 

Tell me.

Don't tell me. 

Not yet.

perspective

Funny how solid objects "move." Intriguing how angle and perspective alter everything. The five emerald onion domes of St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church seem to sit just above the railroad bridge as you proceed west on Erie Boulevard toward West Genesee Street. But in my mind I think of them as residing a ways to the left, up the hill, Tipperary Hill. The iconic (literally and figuratively) church is to the left -- from certain angles. As the road bends or turns, you bend or turn with it. Each turn or bend presents a different perspective. An aerial view offers a whole different angle. Up close, far away, above or below, all different perspectives. Perspective is perception. Hashtag metaphor.