Our Town

"It's like that race in France, ain't it?" he snuffled as Saturday bike riders whizzed around us, cutting through the town center intersection to join the other side of the bike trail. He trundled off the median and into the street crossing through the oncoming traffic, the dry cleaning bag he was carrying billowing out like a sail behind him. I noticed the bag contained khaki short pants identical to the ones he was wearing, and imagined row upon row of identical pair in the bedroom closet of his neatly appointed three room flat in the Blissful Bounty Retirement Residence.

"Your hair gone!" she bellowed, waving her hands above her head. I nodded. "You sick again? I make you soup." She pushed through the swing door that separated the restaurant from it's kitchen and screamed into the cacophony of pots and pans. She screamed in Chinese and at her husband the cook, in tones so vitriolic that it could have only been like: "Wonton soup and white rice right now! And no msg, you monkey's behind! It's the sick Negress from next door! Her hair fell out, probably from eating your horrible food, you son of a swine!"

Sweetie and Sugah toil at the drug store. Sugah is from India and speaks in horror of Phoenix where her daughter lives. "It's so hot it makes me feel dead," she intones, her doe-brown eyes gone wide. "No, I'm serious, honey. These are two-for-one, dear." I am non-plussed, until she tells me "Go! Go! Go get the other bottle!..." of spring water, buy one get one free. We discuss our diabetes. "I am hungry all the time," she says, munching Kashi go lean from the box. I tell her of my appetite suppressing nausea and she says "I wish," and we giggle.

Sweetie comes in on the weekends to run the register. She is from an African country, so beautiful and deep that it shows in her face, a smooth ebony with the glow of the sun. "I must learn to drive," she tells me. "My sister is volunteering at the library. FOR NO MONEY. Will you look at my resume, sometime? I want to work with children, not in this place all my life." She caught a drunken man trying to steal a bottle of Purell hand sanitizer. She marched him back to the register, wordlessly paid for the bottle herself, and handed it back to him. "He stank," she explained to me as he furtively exited the store. Later I saw him in the alley, giving himself a dry Purell bath.

I glide into my favorite giftie store, borne upon a wave of softly undulating new age music which covers up the squeak of my movements across the old wood floors. All of the women who work here seem so effervescent, mellow, and friendly---perhaps they smoke pot in the basement. I waft among the treasures there, the one-of-a-kind earrings, the saying stones, the purses modeled after samurai pouches, the vibrant whisper soft scarves, the ArtGirlz pins that say "imagine" and "lust."

The Slovenly Guy sits at one of the outdoor tables in front of Starbucks, nursing a cup of coffee, chain smoking and making off-color remarks to passers-by. He said something insulting to two women who passed by holding hands, and one of them got right in his face and said "fuck you," with accompanying hand gesture. He shrank to half his size and mumbled "I was only tryin' to be friendly," to their retreating backs.

I give the new Yoga center a wide berth during my perambulations. Strange, culty vibes. There's always a minion at the front desk staring out into the street as though to compel the masses to join..."if you'll only cross our threshold, you will experience healing beyond measure, all for 1/2 your life savings. In the tiny rooms behind me, meet your destiny, stretch your body like a pretzel and participate in creepy...ahem!...life-affirming group hugs with people you hardly know."

My neighbor S and his wife, D, are from Nepal. S has high blood pressure and OCD and writes beautiful love songs in Sanskrit that he sings on Saturday mornings, strumming his guitar. Their apartment is so clean you could eat off the floor and the delicious saffron and onion smells from their kitchen make me happy. I pass by their windows on the way to my stairs. "We're having Thai, tonight!" S shouts joyously, a short, broad, brown man with a shock of strong black hair, his bare feet rooted to the earth half a planet away from his homeland.

She drives a red neon and works at the 1/2 price bookstore, a place so sacred to me that I can hardly believe it exists just outside my door. "The new Donna Leon came in," she nasally intones, her head just at my shoulder. The store is air conditioned to a slight frost, and the smell of old pages and dusty prose intoxicates. She putters behind me and speaks of her cats, Neon and Astra, the new Harry Potter midnight promotion, how the insurance company screwed her when she retired. She brings the step stool so I can sit and peruse the lower reaches of the mystery section. "We have magazines, now," she says, her contempt obvious. I gaze over the mag selection and agree. There is no "New Yorker."

Yadda lives at the end of the building and spends summer days roasting herself to a crisp in a beach chair set out on our tar paper roof. "How a-uuuuuu!" she sings as I pass by, her hair a beacon of white, her skin the color of wheat toast. She always knows the forecast and advises me on umbrella usage and suitable outerwear for the work day.

The waiters from the Indian restaurant play soccer in the alley. A truck bound for the highway rumbles by, it's horn sounding like a ship's blare. Poopy the cat screams at the birds who nest in the waving branches outside the bedroom window. The bell player practices at the Catholic Church, sometimes stumbling over what I swear sounds like the Stones "you can't always get what you want."

Ahhhhhh....Home.