Cities Have Skin

I woke with the word “ribbons” in my mind, imagining Peg’s bed, she having risen in my imagination, her bed a bowl-like affair, mattress a hollow, resting on a nest of rattan.  Nest, hollow, bowl, something that holds her, keeps her from falling out, out of the fifteenth floor window, the east-facing window, looking to the sun rising over the endless lake Michigan, the beach, the Lake Shore Drive, the quarter mile of trees and lawn and flowerbeds that is Lincoln Park.  Ribbons, I wondered.    There it is, the sun rising over the lake . . . no, from the lake, like Venus, no scrap of drape to hide any of her, too bright to look at anyway.  The ribbon, I thought, might have been the symbol of this strip of the image of Chicago, the Miracle Mile, north of the cluster of crystalline growth of skyscrapers just behind the Drive and its parkway, the right way to design a city on the water, so you can stand back, like a grandmother who holds the young child at arm’s length, eyes twinkling, voice saying “let me take a look at you.”  Or maybe there were ribbons in that nest, whimsical bright things, long and flowing things, functioning to hold it together, the fragility of it, the holding-of-life up-high of it.

This East-facing view.  Perfect.  

But we had gone west last evening, west a mile or two, to where the Vietnamese restaurant was, where the winds blew not smooth water into waves, nor shining sand into those perfect ripples, but discarded papers and wrappers into their dance as stringless kites and dirt into squinting eyes.  The people here were not white-skinned joggers and strollers, but yellow-skinned, brown skinned, black skinned, not a Nike “swoosh” or NorthFace shoulder patch in sight, no running shoes; they wore simple clothing, functional, worn.  The sidewalks and streets were pockmarked by winter salt and wind and rain, worn like some of the old faces in the doorways of the shops.  Here in the West, the interior, under the Lake Shore skin , the wounds and the guts and the blood were visible.  The beggars reminded me of southern Europe, sitting on the sidewalk legs out, so passing pedestrians would need to step over them, perhaps look down, perhaps into the eyes of the plea, words not necessary, but spoken nonetheless, or more accurately mumbled.  And the eyes locked in on us, the bloodshot eyes of the one who saw us coming out of the Vietnamese grocery with our cart, moving with us across the street, close to us as if there had been a crowd holding him there, or as if he was entering some exclusive area with us, wanting to look as if he were one of us, one of our party.  When we got to the car and I had opened the hatch, he began to reach for the bags, and I thought of the Gypsies that had done this in a train in Spain, come close, grabbed.  “Please let me do work for you; please for fifty cents!”  My Detroit instinct, not to give money to a “panhandler,” money that would feed not him but his habit, rose in my will like a handy phrase in a foreign language, like “Parlez-vous anglais”, or Sprechen sie….”  I was too busy securing our bags to process his face, dark like many in the under-skin of my city, dark of life in the sun, the burning of it, the relentlessness of it.  He changed his phrase from the repeated please let me work.  “I am human!  I am human,” one hand tapping his chest, his heart, while the other continued to reach for the bags, the bags that were mostly in the car now.  “I am refugee, Somalian.”  I thought of Augusto, quiet, docile, gentle, deferent, not from Somalia, but from equally poor Guine-Bissau, who had lived with us years ago.  

As I squeezed the last bag into the car, another hand was reaching for my arm.  My eyes followed the arm to a small body, thin, and a face as thin, this one Asian.  He looked at me, and at the cart, and he pointed to the cart, and back at the store, and I understood, and nodded yes, and thanked him as he took it back across the street.  I closed the hatch of the car, pressed the “lock” button on my keys, pressed it again just in case, listened to the beepbeep…beepbeep that told me my bags were safe, and would likely be there when we returned after dinner there, in the Vietnamese restaurant there, there among the yellow faces in simple clothes who were quiet, docile, gentle, and deferent.

Facing East.  The sun is an hour over the shining lake now.  It glints off the roofs of cars whizzing by on Lake Shore Drive.  Beyond them, dots of runners’ heads bob along the beach. Strollers walk their dogs down below the window here, dogs that seem to know they are high class, prancing, noses high.  The owners hold long, slack leashes in their right hands, little bags in their left.  Mustn’t leave any anything unsightly, smelly, here where it would show, here on the skin of the city, the outer side of it, the miracle mile of it, the glistening skin on covering the toned muscles of its broad shoulders.   

Peg’s awake now, offering us coffee and a smile.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.