
I hugged a tree on Coldwater this morning and looked up at a blue sky, reminding myself I take it all for granted too many times.
This weekend downtown led me to places that no longer exist. Bunker Hill is now the kingdom of the skyscrapers and museums, Music Center, The Broad and Disney Concert Hall.
Long ago, the old world of noir turned the genteel into the dangerous. Old people, of no use to anyone, reclined on broken porches. Decaying mansions became rooming houses.
Oh, Time, do you ever really change things?
The poor took over the broken places until they were shoved out, promised high rise housing; many of them died before they ever saw these projects completed.
Old speakeasy underneath The King Eddie, where the B Girls plied the gents with tall glasses of whiskey, that were in fact dark tea. It was a con, and every saloon paid its protection money. The girls took breaks, chewed gum, and stuck that sticky stuff on the walls. 80 years later, it remains. AIDS Foundation bought the building and filled it with people needing a roof. A priest works skid row. That's his parish.
We're the tour group. Outside, overweight women in flipflops wheel their belongings, drink soda, and look always like they are waiting for someone. Skinny men out of their heads with bad teeth linger. Everyone is looking for something.
We're not staring at them. We see into what no longer stands. History is lurid and intriguing. The present conditions are not fun to behold.
But Grand Central Market is vibrant. A guy whose name is Andrew is managing all of that joyous food mayhem, and has taken over The Million Dollar Theater too. My mind is ablaze with ideas.
I am just a Valley girl who swoons shivers and shakes when she goes downtown. There are the youngest hippest people, walking dogs, wearing expensive leisure wear. There are the abandoned people, weaving in and out. There are the dreamers, the readers, the collectors, the historians, the developers, the government people, the jurists, the artists, the wealthy.
It's always why I can't leave.
Just when I think I know a place, I go to another center and find I have made myself colloquial in one of the greatest cities on earth. Filthy, corrupt, indecent, unbalanced, full of ambitious and scheming individuals beside saints and idealists, money, poverty, conservatives, socialists, communists, those who speak in tongues, those who light incense, those who make the sign of the cross. I'm in Babel. I'm in multiple halls of cultures. I love it. I fear it. I pray its weird diversity will never disappear.
But I know I am more a spectator down here, a tourist. I might have eaten at Jose Andres' Agua Viva, but I was not on the front line in Gaza, serving people, and gunned down for it.
I'm safe. My world is like living inside a library.
Still, there is wonder all around me.
When I came home from downtown, watching streaming shows was weirdly boring. and why wouldn't it be? When real life is so compelling.
It might be overwhelming at times, but urban life is a daily gift.
Walk out the door , get in the midst of some scene, and you feel it. The more you learn about history, the more you feel we move in cycles and repetitions. Though I am a loner, I realize more and more that I am one with the masses.
That's more comforting than ever to me now, in a weird way.
Do any of us really ever belong? Yet we've got each other.
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