New York Streets
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
These streets are New York streets. In the spring, the trees and the sidewalks out front could be in a clearing in Central Park. The warm sun on the pavement could just as easily fall on old men’s shoulders and cast angles on chessboards and wrought iron tables. The sounds are almost identical, too – light conversation interwoven with the swishing leaves and squirrels jumping invisible in the darkest spots in the highest branches. Our neighborhood is half-a-continent away – further if measured by state of mind. The Heartland people are supposedly not as vocal and more practical as New Yorkers, but the calmness in all the activity makes the pleasure in it are the same for both.
On a Saturday afternoon after a brief rain has washed down the trees and the cars parked along the curb, the sounds from traffic and children playing carry up the street through window screens in the rental units creating background noise but little awareness. The people live in tall, narrow homes – townhouses – with bedrooms and hallways stacked upon themselves with a few windows and front porch stoops where the proprietors come out to smoke and to chat or for a second’s peace. What they find isn’t exactly stillness and the peace has to be extracted from someone else’s tribulation. Ambulance and police sirens trail off to the emergency room at a main intersection a mile off.
Drawn into its own borough, the necessities are in walking distance: a grocery, a liquor store and several taverns, a sandwich shop, a few restaurants serving everything from breakfast to stir fry – again, the loud hospital – a dry cleaners, and entertainment in a movie theater and a comedy club. Old women follow dogs on leashes along the medians lined with trees. By the way they follow intently and pull at the leash gently, it’s evident they are women whose closest companions are these dogs. They aren’t out for a walk alone to get away. Their husbands were gone a long time ago, by their own choice or otherwise, and this is it for them. The dogs, the walking, the sunshine, and sometimes in a day nothing but a few words passed between them and the few people they exchange head nods with or pass at the mailboxes.
At the corner, the buses stall with big breaths blown into oncoming traffic. Locals amble on or off – the older passengers step off with little plastic shopping bags from any number of stores in a block radius. Younger ones step out in a hurry, step around the slow-moving seniors and disappear down side-streets into the tall homes. Little girls play on the sidewalk and on the blacktop. They use chalk and leave fluorescent flowers and rainbows on the cement that leaves the joggers timid about where to step. Big groups of kids come together on bicycles, and a few stand with them between their legs while the few without them shift weight and point, the noise growing until the entire conversations can be heard, but somehow the adults hear nothing streaming in their windows or open garage doors. The kids exist in a world all their own; a private place, as dangerous and let alone the Bronx kids, where they are left unto themselves and no one notices them or the sounds of the city.
