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a walk in the city
2008-04-08 10:21 p.m.

It's weird - so weird - to see white men in new sneaks and sweat-wicking waffle fabrics jogging down the streets of Newark. They pass broke down central high school, broke down bus stops, broke down block-apartments, broke down people hanging round all of the above. Who are they? Where do they come from? Downtown - the Prudential building or the government offices? Are they on lunch? Do they live in here? No, they just work here. I decided. Corporate, too clean and healthy. The sun shines on them - when the sun shines - and it's impossible to ignore their grouped-together whiteness. It makes my own harder to forget.

Thought about that, lunch-break running clubs, when walking between the two universities I'm still affiliated with, right around lunch time. My roles in each place have changed, but I'm still around, can't cut the cord. Saw a guy I haven't seen in years right after I saw the runners today. He teaches math. He's very loud. He called out to me, from across Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard: "STILL GOT YOU ON THAT TRAIN, DO THEY?". Yes, I called back, from across the street, or rather "YES. STILL CATCHING THE NOON TRAIN FROM OVER THERE TO OVER HERE". He retreated one way, I went another. No train - just my feet, as we're only being metaphoric, he and I - but still on a track between two places I haven't left in over ten years.

But the runners, there are more of them now than when I first arrived here. Other things have changed: more armed robberies, new expensive row houses, more white students, new pregnant black teens, 14 years old, maybe 16. Also dead birds, pretty much everywhere. I complained last semester to one of the universities about the birds, but was told "the birds fly into the building windows from time to time, and die". But why are they all over the lawn and side of the road, too? I think of "Canary in a Coal Mine" by the Police when I see the birds, and remember this explanation and the utter dismissal the physical plant person had for my concerns of pesticide/pollution/toxic waste/air contamination. "First to fall over when the atmosphere is less than perfect/your sensibilities are shaken by the slightest defect". I live my life like a Canary in a Coal Mine, I get so dizzy even walking in a straight line.

After I taught my class about critiques of capitalism and imperialism in Apocalypse Now, I took a different route back to the other school, where I park my car. I passed a broke down building. No runners, no pregnant teen girls, no dead birds. I did have a near-miss with the discarded left-overs of someone's lunch: chicken bones and spattered ketchup packets. I passed unscathed but not unaffected. I heard the sweetest music, just pouring out of the broke down building. An empty building. Someone was playing drums - congas, I think - over a recorded track. But no one could possibly live in the building the music was coming out of. So why sit in there and play congas? If I was a different sort of girl, the sort of girl I was before I became the sort of girl I am now, I would have gone in, or called up to ask. Just to find out who plays congas in a broke-down building. But I didn't. I didn't and don't want any more definition or explanation for that moment - I just wanted to leave with the thought that there's some powerful undercurrent of mysterious beauty and melody living in between spaces here, living lurking sneaking in spaces it shouldn't belong.

I drove away pretty happy, for no particular reason. Later I ran 4 miles in a neighborhood really really far from where I work. The only things I saw were trees and horses. The two places couldn't be more different, and perfectly fitting is the fact that I don't fit into either. Square peg, in between spaces, maybe a pretty good melody.