Where I Was From

Bloomsday

A short, feverish morning at home listening to the periodic crash and roll of the brusque voices of a dozen or so German shepherds next door coaxed me toward the street, cringing at the methodical cacophany, as measured as the tides. Wave after wave of dogs. No more time to waste reading work email when I was meant to roam the streets, an afternoon's urban odyssey.

We set our clearly-defined rules and obeyed them: all cell phones were left at home, boundaries were marked between Western, Shakespeare, the Kennedy, Ashland, and North, and we meandered forth into the muggy Bloomsday heat, wandering rocks, no guarantee of any of us coming across the others. The Puerto Rican festival raged somewhere around a corner and the neighborhood drifted west to join clad in red, white, and blue but I alone dressed in blank white and slouched east toward Western, a foreigner for a day, backwards against the current.

And on into the sunbaked, drizzling afternoon. Friends were found and misplaced, some equipped with packs full of books, umbrellas, and scotch, myself carrying little more than a wristwatch. The sun and rain tired of flirting with one another and called the thick night in to take their place as the tide of patrons shifted. Barstools were gradually draped with the colorful skirts of tidier women. A different neighborhood rushing in. Ineluctable modality of the visible.

Out again into the street and away from the group with a passing woman and her bear of a dog, northward, lost somewhere between conversation and Milwaukee Avenue and finally, alone, charted a weary course home.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 1:19 PM