You might have lived on your same city street all your
life, but never ventured down it past a certain point. Or perhaps you’ve
explored up and down your own street, but there are many nearby streets you’ve
never explored past the corner convenience store where you get your coffee, or
past the gas station where you regularly fill up before you veer off to pursue
your day’s business along farther avenues.
The other day I realized how many blocks right in my own
neighborhood I knew nothing about. I would turn off the next main street and
visit an acquaintance who lived just a few doors further down on a residential
street near my house. But I had no idea what lay beyond on that typical-seeming
street. For all I knew, it might have been labeled “Here be monsters,” as the
old cartographers would label the terra incognita that no explorer had yet
reached on our globe.
So the other day I made my own exploration. I passed my friend’s
house and walked on down the street, farther than I’d ever been before. And
there were wonders to behold.
After a while, I found the street was blocked off to cars.
The only way anyone could have continued straight ahead was on foot, across an
old bridge that spanned the Chicago River there at one of its shallowest,
laziest stretches. The sidewalk led up onto the bridge with its picturesquely
rusty cross-beams. Looking through the diamond-frame of those cross-beams, I
saw some ducks. They weren’t paddling on the water. This early balmy spring day
was too leisurely for any effort like that. They were letting the current just
drift them along, taking them where it would.
Where the bridge rejoined the sidewalk on the far side
again, there was a triangle of fenced-in land that seemed to belong to no one
in particular. It was heaped with antique discard - with old bushel baskets,
tires, and stove compartments. Some weedy vines had overgrown this ancient
offal, running down to the water’s edge. But the overall effect was not one of
ugly discord. In this context, the accumulated rubbish looked like a treasure
trove that invited a searching eye.
I went on in the same unappointed spirit as the ducks.
Many of the houses along here were neat bungalows, with catchy yard
decorations. I passed miniature windmills and lighthouses. I walked along the
coming block, and then the next. Then I was burst out onto another business
street. I had driven along this street fairly often, but I’d never come at it
from this angle before, or on foot. It was like lying down on your kitchen
floor. There were unsuspected twists and turns, pipings and utilities. Looking
at the workings of this ethnic neighborhood from such a different angle of
approach, I saw things from a whole new perspective. I could see things that
drive-bys often don’t give a person time to see.
I was immediately greeted by the big flapping dark wings
of rugs posted out on the sidewalk for sale. There were rugs and blankets, hung
on huge versions of newspaper racks. They waved me over, inviting inspection. Tigers
and pandas waited to pounce out at me from this jungle of plush pile fabric.
Some of the blankets were also imprinted with race cars and superheroes like
Spiderman that zoomed out as I riffled through the racks. There was a big
Justin Bieber looking with plush disinterest off into the distance.
The street was lined with discount stores that had arrays
of Spanish, Korean, and Indian knick-knacks in their windows. A man was
waltzing a floor lamp with a faux Tiffany lampshade out onto the street. A fat
Buddha candle-holder beamed out beatifically at me. Seen quickly from a distance,
all this might have seemed like a clutter of kitsch. But on foot on the street
that sunny spring day, I felt as if I was inside the object chamber of a
kaleidoscope, morphing along with the other sparkling shapes and shards,
forming new patterns of thought.
Most arresting of all was a line-up of just the lower
halves of female mannequins out on the sidewalk. They were covered in brightly
colored skin tight jeans and leotards. The mannequin’s derrieres were all plumply
facing the public, an army of partial pin-ups. In unconsciously ironic
reflection of this theme, there were several fruit carts parked nearby, laden
with early peaches, mangoes, and other produce likely from south of the border.
Restaurants with dancing tacos painted on their windows were interspersed with
the discount shops.
The whole street was alive with quirky initiative. It all
reminded me of the film biographies of American notables such as George
Gershwin who grew up in Brooklyn in the early part of the 20th
century. Brooklyn then was usually shown as a complex harmony of immigrant
energy and enterprise. There were always people calling to each other from fire
escape stairways. There were peddlers hawking their wares, pitchmen, con-men,
and pick-up artists brassing up every corner. And here it was again, a street
that the young Gershwin would have recognized. Except – on this busy commercial
street, a staccato Spanish clip predominated rather than Eastern European schmaltz.
That different note of immigrant music was sounded most
strikingly as I walked back, off the main street, onto the leafy residential
street again. As I passed along, approaching the bridge, I heard it – the
clarion call of a rooster. Again and again, the rooster announced itself. It happily
reminded me that keeping chickens and roosters had once again been made legal
in Chicago, although the ordinance is always in danger of being rescinded.
Once having discovered this walk, I’ve returned along the
same route several times since. And always, during either my coming or going,
the rooster announces itself from behind some fence. I have never seen it, and
I can never quite pin down which house and which fence it’s behind. It has
become like the Wizard of Oz, a disembodied oracle whose reality I don’t quite
want to expose. I just appreciate its greeting – and walk on.
Have you explored any of your neighboring side streets
lately? Have you walked along one of them farther and farther, beyond where
you’d ever gone before?
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