Observations From Around the Neighborhood
Life is slowly returning to normal, here in Bmore, after the Snow-pocalypse. By and large, most folks have finished digging out their cars. In the city, there are very few places to put snow that has been shoveled away, so people shovel out just enough snow at the front and back of their cars—allowing room to move in and out of the space. What is left is a crooked column of snow, reminiscent of rock formations out West. Having put all the effort into shoveling out their space, people turn to defending it from the vultures—other drivers that might come along and steal the space after they have left, forcing them to park a block away at the grocery store. They mount their defense by putting an obstacle in the way, with chairs seeming to be the weapon of choice. It should be noted that this is a crime, punishable by a $140 fine and two points taken off your license. Suffice to say, our street is a sight to be seen.
People here suck about shoveling their sidewalks. Those who choose to shovel feel that it is sufficient to clear only enough space for one person to walk through. This means that whenever you encounter someone walking the other direction (apparently that’s how sidewalks work) you have to look for outlets such as people’s front steps into which you can side-step so the other person can pass. Other people have simply failed to shovel at all, meaning that the snow in front of their house gets packed down into ice. If I could I would point out to those people that the sheet of ice in front of their house is prime territory for a senior citizen to slip and fall on, breaking their hip in the process. Thank goodness God keeps tabs on those people and will one day punish them.
The snowfall has led to the emergence of a number of entrepreneurs. Young men with shovels walk up and down the street offering to dig out people’s cars and sidewalks. Interestingly, the local meth addicts have been equally adept in breaking into this market. About a week ago, I awoke (at about midday) to my roommate asking if he knew anything about someone from our house asking to have our car shoveled out. He explained that there was a shady-looking gentleman at the door who claimed that we had. I opened the door to find Grizzly Adams’s “This is you on drugs” billboard picture standing there in the flesh. He explained that “someone” from our house had asked his friend “Tim” to shovel for us. “Tim,” however, had been shot in the leg the night before and, naturally, could not do it himself. Therefore, he had sent Grizzly (I never got his real name) in his place. I told him that we could do it ourselves and sent him on his way. I still see him around—he’s a nice guy.
I went for an 8-mile walk yesterday and saw more of downtown. Public transportation is terrible here, so it’s easy to feel isolated if you don’t have a car. I had been thinking about how little of the city I have experienced, despite having lived here for two-and-a-half months. It was a beautiful day, and I got to see a lot of parts of Baltimore that I had been meaning to see. There is a Washington Monument downtown that predates the one in DC and is, in my opinion, quite a bit cooler. It is a column with a statue of Washington riding a horse on top. Take that, lame ass obelisk. Beside it is an old Methodist Church with a plaque that claims that it is the site of Francis Scott Key’s death. The whole experience reminded me of the importance of being a tourist in your own city. It is so easy to get into a routine and forget to appreciate the beauty around you. I should make the rather poetic observation that the monument is just south of Penn Station, which I have walked to numerous times, in the process of traveling somewhere else. I finally kept walking and-voila-there was Baltimore.
As a final note, I have been pondering something recently. Like most Yankee boys, I grew up making jabs about racism in the South. Although Maryland is not the South, it is a border state. It fought for the Union during the Civil War, but many of its residents were Confederate-sympathizers. I am reading a book called “State By State” which is a collection of essays by various writers about their home states. The essay about Maryland was about how the author grew up thinking of herself as a Yankee, not realizing how much of her state was culturally linked to the South.
Anyhow, back to my point. Way back during Pre-Service Orientation, I got to meet a lot of Southerners of all races. They seemed to interact with one another with an ease that I had not seen, growing up in the North. I realized then, as I do now, that, despite its long history of racial injustice, the South actually has black people living in it. There are parts of the Deep South that have almost 20 times as many African Americans as do the whiter parts of the country. Therefore, unlike many parts of the North, race relations are not conceptual, they are a daily reality. I think that the ease I saw springs from the fact that the White and Black people have been interacting with each other for so many generations. There are so many Northern communities where racial harmony is accepted in the abstract, until people of color actually start to move into the neighborhood. Then, the discomfort sets in. Even in the face of great discord, actual human interaction breaks down barriers. Us Yankees are behind the curve in that regard.
