Separate Ways
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
I am parked out behind the old pizza place at 5:30, by a stained wooden privacy fence separating the parking lot from an Colonial style house with flaking paint. The fencerows in this neighborhood are overhung with greenery either for latent privacy or sound insulation from the highway.
The lot has been freshly laid and its black as tar, which draws the heat and aggression of the fading late-August sun. I have the windows rolled down but only the sounds seem to penetrate, no air and no smells – just cars stopping and starting, rubber wheels screeching on the asphalt, a motorcycle sputtering to life deeply and hollowly, all its noise reverberating on the fence and the pizza place. How many stoic people are on the road now on their way home to places with the workday ended, with home as a destination or even a goal for most of the day, but with this vague banality in them – not rejoicing, but instead shut down and or just reserved on the time they have for themselves?
Crickets in the nearby bushes sense the twilight and set in with music. What clouds there are in the sky are whispy and thin so the sun shines through and there is no temporary shade. How many of the people on the home now recognized the sky today or will later? Few if any. And in this place where existences not more than 50 years ago used to be so tied to farming and what happened with the weather isn’t a consideration at all anymore for most.
The spaces begin to fill up. A Buick pulls in with the windows down and the driver kills the engine and an over-loud radio commercial. Traffic has died down considerably and the wind with it. Above the fenceposts, the branches hang completely still. My mind slows down. I’m starting to sink into the relaxed front-porch-swing mentality, wise for my years and can see myself in old age commenting harshly about the kids that pass on the sidewalk – berating them for the clothes they wear and their stupidity for playing so close to the street.
As the vision comes to me, my wife approaches the driver’s side window with kids in tow and I look out into the parking and, for the first time this afternoon, see something familiar. We’re only five miles from our house, but this might as well be another world – parked out here at an hour when everyone seems to be going separate ways.
