Night Visions 1.1

As I saw my daughter and her husband off tonight, out my front door, I suddenly saw what looked to be a familiar car parked two doors down. Could it be? A peppercorn-colored Mini, just like the one that parked here so many times before.

Streets like this one don't really change all that much year to year. Some folks move out, others move in. The mix of people stays pretty much the same. The cars become familiar to all of us. One relentlessly negative aspect of living on the west side of Hampshire Street is the wind tunnel that inevitably blows trash our way, day after day and night after night.

Negative, that is, for everyone but me. I love to wonder along my street and others nearby, camera in hand. The result is my photo site Sidewalk Images. Tonight, for example, I found an old wooden picture frame propped against a tree, and a discarded box of PopPops from China.

Couples form here, make sweet love, break up. One person disappears,perhaps forever. As it happens, J had a close connection to my exact spot on this block because her close friend Laura used to live across the street until not long before J and I met. By then, Laura had moved, but for J, it was deja vu all over again.

I never told her this, but when we found her apartment, on the corner of 27th and Dolores, it was just a few blocks from where an ex-girlfriend of mine once lived. It also was so close to where I lived until three years ago with my second wife that we often ended up shopping at the same corner store, the same coffee shop, the same laundry, the same restaurants.

The particular corner store I'm thinking of sells the ginger ale J prefers at a good price; once this spring when she was feeling ill, I went there and got it for her.

In my neighborhood, many people know me as that guy with three young kids. The guys at the corner store adore them, the neighbors smile at them, people down the block ask after them when they aren't here.

Tonight, my second-youngest artist went to work on a cartoon he's creating.


In the end, that Mini I saw turned out to be yellow and black. So much for my fantasies, which are the fate of a rejected lover. Tonight, J-1 sleeps happily in Biloxi, secure that I am no longer her problem.

Like a relay race. Hand off the baton (read: guy) and hope the next one can take him on.