The heat has yielded to a chillier air, but the flowers are blooming, and babies are out in the sun. Today, outside my office a covey of baby Canadian Geese were grazing with their parents.
I stood outside with my coffee for a few minutes, as the adult geese eyed me suspiciously. A pretty woman with dark hair and dark eyes was just arriving at our office; she joined me to watch the fuzzy goose family.
Meanwhile, young James is getting out with his parents in sunny Oregon, and he's adopting a cool new look in his shades.
Living in cities is stimulating, sure, but it also requires a constant state of imagination to fully appreciate its possibilities. Imagine a backyard stoop, deep in the inner city.
You've seen it for years, but it is so unremarkable as to be one set of angles in a massive matrix of the urban landscape around you. You know that an Asian family lives there, that an old woman hangs her wash on the clothesline out back, that some of the neighboorhood cats consider that stoop home.
Then, one day, something is different. You sense it before you see anything specific. You're just wandering around your yard like always when you sense new eyes on you. You look up and into the gaze of a lovely young Asian woman, sitting on the top step, smoking.
You smile and nod, she does the same.
It's odd how a little touch of beauty can transform a somewhat dingy stretch of real estate into a world of art and mystery. Over the months after first glimpsing this angel, your eyes can't help but return to this stoop whenever you are out in the yard. Now and again, she appears again, always sitting silently, smoking, gazing off in the distance.
Sometimes she is dressed; other times she wears a robe and slippers. It's impolite to stare, especially a man at a woman, so you don't, but you do glance, hopefully, every single time.
It's an odd example of an urban relationship. You've never met this woman, nor are you likely to. You can't know anything substantive about her, other than she is young, pretty, a smoker, and apparently living with her parents (or grandparents?)
Maybe these types of stories end best just like that -- without any resolution. After all, unlike the happy endings and sad endings so familiar from movies, a story without resolution is a story where hope remains.
-30-
1 comment:
Perhaps in this, David, there is a certain charm, and may be even a certain lesson. Something of contrast between small communities and sprawling cities, between traditional and comtemporary, between ancient and modern - though who can say someone did not think just as you in ancient Ur or Uruk?
In a small community the stories are written to an extent by the familiar, by the closeness and interconnectedness of being surrounded by people who know you and your business as you know them and their business in equal measure.
Here is a story that is a glimpse, that is an invitation to tell your own tale. Here is soul so close and yet so far - you do not know anything of her, but you are inspired to create a story in your heart and mind to say something about her.
It is, perhaps, oddly a form of creativity, perhaps even of creative freedom, born out of the lack of ability to be connected to others in an urban setting.
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