One of the things that is most comfortable about this neighborhood is that people still sit out on their porches. Just sitting. Talking.
I felt the tug tonight myself. And just stood out on my porch. Like a prairie dog, just surveying the plains.
It's also fascinating being in the minority here, because everyone is a minority.
I would love to do a neighborhood inventory to find out just how many nations are represented, and how many ethnicities from within those nations.
I will have to fly a Scottish flag underneath the U.S. Flag on the porch. Maybe that and the Episcopal crest. Or some combination of the other major national identities of my ancestors.
Everywhere I go, I am the only anglo. In the local Asian market around the corner, the customer was speaking Spanish to the counter clerk. The were communicating basically in nods and bits of shared English.
Walking the streets here requires an openess to experience. You do run into drunks and homeless characters on Elmwood, but they are extraordinarily polite, just part of the same street scene as the vendors and the cops, except making their way on the generosity of others, in their failed lives.
But unlike other cities, where the gap between rich and poor is much more stark, here, we are all mostly just a paycheck away from downgrading our quality lives. It makes the generosity a little more but for the grace of God go I.
We're a little luckier than most, but that has a lot more to do with luck than it did even just a few decades ago. Being born into the right family. The right skin color. The right education.Those opportunities must be grasped to be made fully manifest, but they were at least within our grasp, ours to lose from the beginning, rather than struggle to gain.
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