Do You Love Your City?

So I came back from my Cathedral Hill noontime walk. Everything seemed to fit in the scenery: the two men in their green Paisano’s work shirts smoking outside their deli; the brightly painted Victorian window frames and doors; even the garbage, suspended by the late fall winds in dry bushes and leafless trees. The whole neighborhood was loud and bustling but orchestrated, in rhythm. Bikers were out in helmets and bumble bee–inspired spandex. A young mother stopped to fix the blanket in her baby’s stroller. An old woman with a walker came up to me on the sidewalk along Selby and said, “This neighborhood has changed so much. I used to live here twenty-five years ago and I haven’t been around for a long time. Look at how they’ve changed the buildings.” She didn’t seem agitated or melancholy. Just surprised.

It’s been a long, hard month. I have all this pent-up energy but the fatigue that comes from doing too much of the things I really would rather not do. I read something today about people liking people who are buoyant and full of passion. I thought, “I haven’t felt bouyant for awhile.”

So on this noontime walk I had to remind myself I didn’t need anything from it but it. I didn’t need to think “Ah, if I had my camera I would look at the north side of the Cathedral this way”; but rather, I told myself to just look. Now. Look at it. Not how you should see the image, not what you should be inspired to do after seeing the image, but just: See it. Feel it. There are many days I want to strangle the editor in me.

There was a guy up on some scaffolding with a heat gun scraping the old paint from his vintage home. But when I first looked up I was just looking at the architecture of the nearby buildings, the red brick against the fat white columns, the “Marquette on the Hill” sign, the pointed turrets of the old mansions. And then I saw his nice, slim legs dangling from the scaffold--the rest of him was hidden. Just legs dangling in the air. It was a Magritte moment.

My own neighborhood can be eclectic, at least architecturally. The houses are quite varied, from a few one-story ramblers to Twenties-era bungalows, Cape Cod cottages, an oddly modern, ill-designed split-level, and then the grand colonials of Edgcumbe Road. Not so many cars parked on the streets--most people have garages; and only a few people of color--the black man who lives near Talmud Torah and takes many strolls along the parkway; the Spanish-born, rich prep-school kids who moved into the corner house down the street; the Somali family on Scheffer. We are Jewish and Catholic, Democrats and Republicans, young and old. Sometimes you can tell our sentiments by our political lawn signs (Peace Now) and our bumper stickers, "Proud Parents of an Expo A-Honor Roll Student." A few of the newer families--those spending $400,000 and up for houses vacated by our elderly neighbors--put up big 6-foot-high fences around their back yards. I see only the noses of their cats or dogs under the fenceline, snooping out the sounds of the neighborhood. The noise is different than in the heart of the city--cars zip by often but they are smoother, newer models. There are lots of kids in the yards along my street and though they are fairly young they seem to know they are safe. They squeal and shout and scream with abandon.

I saw one young three-year-old peering out the first-floor window of the newish housing complex on Selby. I hope he gets outside today.