Walking Home from the bus

City Walk

And, on the way home, I walk past a man with a pit bull on what I generously am describing as a leash, but what appears instead to be a blue piece of thick cloth wreathed around his neck. Like most people of a certain age, over eleven or so, the prospect of an oncoming pit bull or whatever in the company of a cloth leash does not engender much faith. I carry out various fantasies of fighting off the pit bull, trying to calculate the degree of damage I’d be taking in the process, and what sort of affect my new face would have on people I know. The owner crosses the street with the pit bull before he reaches me,  no doubt sensing how close my fantasy was to coming true, or being aware that people are often strange and distrustful around his dog.

And walking down the street comes the strong smell of fast food, enticing and sickening. What’s strange is that it’s stronger here across the street from McDonald’s than it is near the parking lot, and one can imagine the vast quantities, megatons of food each day that are reliant upon vats of grease and not wonder too much about the biological implications or reward mechanisms built in that tell us that such dense food is precisely what we need to keep ourselves alive, and what frail stick castles do these mounds of flesh turn out to be.

I walk down the DC sidewalk, past the street cratered with pot holes found in nearly every neighborhood, as if we are all living on the moon. I pass beneath a tree littered with birds, cacophonous with them, white streaks on the sidewalk to mark their incessant squawking. I hunch my shoulders as I duck beneath this strange tree, a one tree urban forest, as if I can steel myself against the shi-.

Relieved from the threat of imminent bird shi- I’m able to appreciate the precise beauty of the fall light that always strikes me this time of year. The light happens just before sunset come fall, turning everything golden, oaks momentarily clothes in the finery of kings, and even the old red bricks visible across parking lots bathed in shadows are given the sheen of Orthodox church walls and one expects almost to see a saint amongst them.

In our yards, the gossamer strands of a spider web stretch the four feet between power lines, made almost indistinct in the shadow cast by our house. This is the first day in six that I’ve not had a headache, and so it makes me thankful for these small things that have been hiding in plain sight.