Fig. 01 — placeholder illustration
A stand-in for the photograph that would sit here in the printed piece. Late sun. Houses along 18th. The dog is real.
The block I live on slopes gently east, which means that for about forty minutes each afternoon the light arrives at a low angle and turns every surface it touches a color it wasn't before. The asphalt becomes purple. The chain-link becomes gold. The stucco on the apartment building across from mine turns the particular pink of a cheek after crying. This happens every day and I almost never watch it.
Tonight I did. I left at 6:12 with no errand, no podcast in my ears, no destination past the end of the block, which is a condition I have to manufacture on purpose now. It used to be the baseline. My hands didn't know what to do. I put them in my pockets and took them out and then gave up and let them swing.
The first thing I noticed was the fig tree behind the Armenian family's fence. It has been there longer than they have, I think. It leans over the sidewalk in August and drops fruit that nobody picks, and by now I have a feeling about the fig tree the way I used to have feelings about certain teachers: gratitude, faint embarrassment, the sense that it knows more about me than I know about it. Its leaves today were enormous and slightly curled, like hands held open.
The Yellow Light
Further down, the laundromat was on. The laundromat is always on — it runs until eleven — but at this hour its light has a color no other light in the neighborhood has. A fluorescent sodium yellow, warm-edged, sick-adjacent, the color of a waiting room in a dream. Through the window I could see two people, each reading, each not looking at each other. The dryers tumbled. One of them had a red sock pressed to the glass like a tongue.
Fig. 02Placeholder for the laundromat window at 6:24 p.m. Sodium yellow, red sock. If this were the real piece, there'd be a photograph here, taken from the opposite curb, slightly underexposed so the street stays the color the street actually is.
An older woman was walking toward me with a small brown dog that I recognized before I recognized her. The dog is named Figaro — I know this because the woman who owned him before this woman used to call him from her porch in a voice that carried — and Figaro is now, by my accounting, at least fifteen. He walks with the diagonal gait of an animal who has negotiated a treaty with his own body. He stopped at my shoe and looked up in the specific, slightly offended way of small dogs, and then kept going.
I like knowing this about him. I don't know his current owner's name. I don't know what she does. I know about the dog because the dog is older than the relationship between us, and because streets keep their own records, which are mostly made of small continuities that outlast the people who notice them.
Streets keep their own records. Mostly made of small continuities that outlast the people who notice them.
Three Words
Near the corner I passed two men leaning against a white van, one of them on the phone, the other waiting with the patience of someone who has waited against this van many times before. The one on the phone said, in Spanish, no, the other one, and then laughed at whatever the answer was, and that was the entire piece of the conversation I was given.
I have been turning it over since. No, the other one. I don't know what the other one is. A tool. A sister. A bolt of cloth. A restaurant on Pico. Somewhere there is a correct answer to which one, and the two of them know it, and I was briefly near the warmth of their knowing it without ever being let in, and that felt — I want to say this carefully — like exactly enough. A neighborhood is a place where you are allowed to be near other people's specifics without having to earn them.
Fig. 03Placeholder for fig leaves against the Armenian family's fence at 18th & Ridgely. The pink stucco is real. The fruit, the leaning, the faintly defeated gesture of the lowest branch — all of that is accurate. In the real piece this would be shot from the curb, no flash.
What Stays
The liquor store on the corner has had the same hand-painted sign since I moved here. The paint is now more suggestion than paint — you have to know it used to say MARKET to still read it as MARKET — and every time I walk past, I wonder if the owner knows that the sign is no longer doing the job a sign is supposed to do, and if he does, whether he'd rather let the word dissolve in peace than repaint it and start the clock over.
I think I'd let it dissolve. There's a dignity to things that have earned the right to stop trying. The sign still works for the people who already know what it says. The people who don't know what it says aren't, it turns out, the people the sign is for.
The light was going, by this point, from gold to something bluer. The sparrows started up in the ficus. A car passed slowly — I heard its music before I saw it, a song I didn't know in a language I don't speak, and I had the sudden unreasonable feeling that was the correct soundtrack for this minute, this block, this year. Someone else was scoring the evening and doing a better job than I would have.
I turned around at the end of the block. I had walked maybe four hundred yards. The entire outing, door-to-door, was nineteen minutes. I want to say that something in me had changed, because that is what essays about walks are supposed to say, but I'm not sure it had. What I can say is that for nineteen minutes I noticed what was there, which is less often true than I'd like, and that the neighborhood was — as it always is, and as it will be whether I am watching or not — generously, stubbornly, specifically itself.
Figaro was at the other end of the block now, ahead of his owner, who was checking her phone. He looked back, once, to see if she was coming. She was. They turned the corner. The fig tree kept its hands held open. The laundromat stayed yellow.