View from the R8 SEPTA Regional Rail, somewhere in North Philly
Like a fever, I cannot tell you how long the recent heat wave lasted during this summer of slow discovery. No, not slow, subtle. Not extreme, like changing a gender preference or even a clothing style.
More like adjusting your usual beverage — slightly. Discovering the joy of cinnamon-flecked foam in a cappuccino, when you have always ordered lattes. Or of drinking red wine with OJ and lime seltzer over ice instead of warm and straight up.
Starting to walk–past dusk–when the day’s heat and traffic has dissipated most. Joy in ironing, wearing crisp shirt sleeves and pant creases. In carrying no more than needed. Glowing accomplishment the day the rug is clear of returned papers, dog-eared articles, opened and unopened mail. Knowing the landscape is changing. That a process is happening.
Steady watching.
Take the Regional Rail into Center City. See the immense magnitude of need. People, the streets, the homes. All need. You may flinch, sometimes turn away from the men with chronic, running sores, bloated discolored limbs, bloody, crusted faces. The women, gaunt, wrinkled skin with an attempt at lipstick, carrying too many bags and wearing too many clothes. People. On the streets. For decades.
Wait for trains at Market East, Suburban Station. Talk to friends by phone, knowing where the signal works and does not. Daily, musicians play the train station acoustics, to the waiting—a trio of old black men singing blues, playing electric guitar, bongos, rhythm sticks. They draw a crowd. Yesterday, a man played Chinese classical music on a long thin stringed instrument with a bow. Shyly. More for himself. Another Chinese man stopped to listen from a distance.
Progress reveals, sometimes, by what does not happen.
Feeling fearless in any crowd. Not caring who comes close or what they say. Or want. Smiles, stares, curiosity exchanged. Anticipation is a useless reflex here. “Hey, you got a light?” “Change for the bus?” “Excuse me, where is Chestnut Street?” “C’mon, just some change for a phonecall!” “Honey, you’re tall, have you been a model?” But we all want the same things, don’t we. Really. If you do not acknowledge someone else’s humanity, where does that leave you?
Trash. Trash everywhere. Every. Where. On streets just cleaned and others maybe never. A storm drain that had caved in, then filled with trash, garbage, leaves. Trash now unidentifiable, now part of the street, shaped by the first 100 cars to run over it—what was it? Corner-of-your-eye glimpses give imagination maximum leeway. An old T-shirt or a dead rat? A bag of fast food or a shoe? The streets sparkle with shards of window glass from thousands of car break-ins. Get close to any public fountain or waterfall pool and see murky, gray-green-algae. Floating…trash. Failed attempts at civic beauty. The idea, good from a distance, up close becomes disturbing.
Views from the train reveal what is hidden from streetside: a broken fence, a dog chained without shelter, piles of bald tires, stagnant pools of water, abandoned, crumbling factories, warehouses growing green leafy branches through hollow-eyed windows. A parking lot of rusty delivery trucks, there so long that each one has been completely ’repainted’ with graffiti by different artists–all that is wrecked, forgotten, neglected, illegal.
Around the corner from the train station is Reading Terminal Market. In the cool buyers’ benefit of air-conditioning, vendors serve up every kind of goodie–soul food, vegetarian delicacies, tacos, samosas, shawarma, organic fig bars that melt in your mouth, handmade jewelry, towels and aprons from Provence. A cookbook stall. Another for bonsai and their accessories. Beeswax candles with natural scents. Local organic produce, the best in local coffee bars, fresh fruit smoothies, Amish food and vegetable stands, fish laid out in neat rows on ice still looking stunned, more produce. Pianists bring their own sheet music and play their favorites on the upright piano near a central group of tables. Businessmen and women lunch here in the Beer Garden, or have coffee. Tourist families drag tired fussy children into the diner booths, sigh, order burgers, fries and shakes all around, and study their maps.
On Market Street, a block from City Hall, on the back side of a bus stop shelter, a youngish man — long showerless, in a coat and hat — crouches on a sleeping bag, his dog beside him crunching a biscuit. He holds up his cardboard sign, well-folded then flattened, that states his case for passers-by. “Just need a boost to get back on my feet.” He looks straight ahead at knee-level, never up. The humidity holds 96 degrees of heat. Clouds move in quickly, iron gray, overcast at noon. A wind gust whips down the street, flipping the leaves on the row of trees to their paler side. Thunder rumbles and one flash of lightening seems to rip a seam in the darkest clouds. Rain pours down with the suddenness of an overturned bucket of water.
Our man grabs is bags, his sign, his dog and dashes around into the bus shelter. Everyone else inside moves to the opposite end. Lightening strikes again. Closer.
peace,
ms. spin c
