lime tree bower dot net

(continued from the previous post)

My mother and I moved to Baltimore when I was four. We lived in Hampden, which had not yet been become artsy-bohemian and was still very blue-collar. I learned my new terrain street by street: first, our block with its steep slope and the tree that blew down in a huge storm when I was six. Then, intersecting it, 36th Street, or the Avenue as people called it, home of the five-and-ten where I clandestinely bought my first tube of lipstick and the bakery with the dusty wedding cake always on display in the window. (The five-and-ten is gone, but the bakery is still there today.)

Then sycamore-lined Roland Avenue, which went north past the fire station and the Roland Water Tower, a local landmark. There was Roosevelt Park off at one end of the neighborhood, and Falls Road running by it. There was our local branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library,* a modestly neo-classical brick building that looked grand to my eyes and is still the blueprint for most of my library-themed dreams. At least half the credit for my bibliophile tendencies goes to the children’s librarian there, an unfailingly kind woman who would always greet me with "Amanda! Have you read this yet?" and who knew me from the time I was old enough to read until we moved out of the neighborhood nine years after we first arrived.

Then there were were the blocks where my school friends lived ("I’m going to Debbie’s house," "to Angela’s house," all rowhouses that looked more or less like the other houses but which we distinguished by our friends’ names). And there was the astonishing block of 34th Street where in the winter everyone competed to see who could could cram the most Christmas decorations per square foot on their property. This was the block where any given house might have a glowing plastic Santa complete with elves, sleigh, and reindeer on the porch roof; a creche surrounded by glowing plastic snowmen and more Santas on the lawn; strings of multicolored lights covering every vertical surface of the house itself; and electric candles and wreaths in the windows for good measure. They still do it to this day, and it’s now a tourist attraction.

We had no car, but there were two supermarkets within walking distance and you could get downtown on the bus. I walked to my elementary school, which wasn’t far. Most of my classmates lived nearby and did the same. A crossing guard stood watch over the busiest intersection on 36th Street during the times of day we all were en route to and from school.

It was not an idyllic place, or a politically progressive one; the streets were dirty and the sidewalks sprouted dandelions, a fair number of our neighbors were on welfare, the old lady next door had filled every corner of her house with junk, and people flew the confederate flag from their car antennas. Once I saw a pro-KKK bumper sticker on someone’s car in an alley. Once, just after graduating from fifth grade, I told a kid from my school that I was going to a magnet middle school outside the neighborhood, and she said "You’d better be careful. There’s a lot of black people there, and they’ll steal your lunch money." I remember staring at her with my mouth flapping open in shock. So we were not living amongst urban lefty-types, and that was a source of stress to my staunchly Democratic mother; I’d be idealizing my old neighborhood out of all recognition if I elided that out of the picture.

Those who say Hampden is small-townish, a kind of self-contained village, are right. But the appeal of Baltimore is also in its neighborhood-ness, its air of being made up of a bunch of such villages jumbled up against each other and overlapping at the edges. You can watch the texture of life varying from block to block, with certain constants (rowhouses with white marble steps, for instance) remaining in place. As I grew up, my mental map expanded to include other places, some grander, some poorer: the train station, the ravine-y park around Johns Hopkins University, Washington Monument and the turn-of-the-century mansions along Charles Street, the long blighted stretch of Howard Street, the waterfront, Lexington Market, The (infamous) Block with all the decaying strip clubs, the Walters Art Museum.

This would be where the conclusion would go if there were one, but I find, after all this, that there isn’t any. Just that all subsequent cities I’ve lived in or visited have struck a chord that might never have sounded if I’d grown up in a suburb with nowhere to go except miles away by car. Gritty and sad as Baltimore can be, it shaped me. I have a hard time imagining myself not living in cities, and thus it seems like a no-brainer to me that amenities like transportation and schools and libraries should be available to the public and shared by everyone. And that other people in all their singularity and freakishness should always be nearby, and that my life isn’t detachable from theirs, even when I’m wandering in perfect anonymous contentment along one of the streets I so often return to (as I return to the library) in my dreams.

(Plus, my neighborhood, for all its reactionariness, has always inspired John Waters. Which I like to think of as contributing to my fondness for the campy and the surreal.)

There, that’s what I wanted to say. And I’m having a fit of nostalgia for my home town now.

* Which just won an award for its virtual reference service! I didn’t know that before Googling it. Hurrah for the Pratt!

This is a kind of riff on a conversation going on in various places, most recently this post of Dr. B’s. Also, I’m still thinking about citizenship and what it means. This post is going to wander about and spill over into the next post.

I like being alone. (Those of you who read this blog regularly are probably rolling your eyes right now and saying "No, really? I’m shocked.") I’m a classic introvert: if I don’t get to spend at least part of the day not interacting with other people, I get miserable. However, I am, at a molecular level, a city person. I’m happiest having my alone time in a neighborhood with hundreds of other people above and below and next door and passing by on the street.  Even now, living at the edge of town rather than close to its center, I feel a bit isolated. If I lived in a really rural area, I think I’d be deeply lonely.

Take a concrete example that came up in Dr. B’s comments: transit. In a silly meme post a while back, I said something about how "certain types of people’s fear and disdain of public transportation" is one of my pet peeves. Let me offer an anecdote. One spring break while I was in graduate school in the Great Upper Midwest, two friends and I decided to go on a road trip to Chicago. While there, we had lunch with Friend E’s friend, G, who had been living in Chicago for a while; the restaurant was in Chinatown, so I suggested that E and F and I take the El, since it’s such a quintessential part of the Chicago experience ("the cheapest roller coaster ride in the city," it’s been called), and when I lived in Chicago as an undergrad, I took it all the time to get downtown. When we mentioned to G how we got to the restaurant, she was horrified: "You took the El? I’m scared to take the El! I’ve never taken it! I’ll drive you back, don’t worry!" I considered pointing out to her that her chances of becoming a violent crime statistic were probably higher in a deserted parking garage after dark than on a train car full of people, and I’d never once been hassled on the El, but decided against it. E said, on another occasion, that she hated taking the bus because all the "freaks" rode the bus. (She’s not alone in this opinion; check out this GM-sponsored ad discouraging people from taking public transit.)

I’m troubled by the mindset that everyone has to do their own thing, have their own vehicle, own their own house, go their own way, pull their own weight, not lean on other people, not reach out, not connect, not be reminded of the millions of other lives going on in the world (and if you don’t, you’re a freak, or a naive Pollyanna who’ll just get mugged or knifed). It’s the same thing that bothers me when I read about how people in this country are getting less and less involved with social groups outside their families, bowling by themselves, not going to the movies when they can sit in their living rooms and enjoy "home theater," and retreating more and more into the private sphere.

Have you seen those commercials for that coffeemaker that’s supposed to make coffee-shop-quality coffee right in your own kitchen? And the accompanying visual is a busy sidewalk café that suddenly vanishes and is replaced by one of the coffeemakers brewing away right there on the sidewalk, and then we cut to the same coffeemaker in someone’s kitchen? That commercial always makes my heart sink a little lower in my chest. It took me a while to figure out just why it’s so depressing, but it’s because the advertisers have missed the whole point of why people go to coffee places. It’s not the coffee, most of the time. It’s the being at a table and reading in the company of other people who are also sitting and reading the newspaper, or talking to the other people, or whatever. It’s a communal experience. But the really depressing thing about that commercial is that maybe the advertisers are on to something, after all, and people really would rather drink coffee in the privacy of their own homes than go somewhere and watch the world go by. Or that people just don’t have the time anymore (this is a whole other rant, so I will bracket it for the time being).

It’s sort of hypocritical of me to say all this, I suppose, because I’ve never really been a poster child for community involvement, and I have in the past tended to be a stubbornly independent individualist who avoided human contact. But I think this was in part because I spent my life in cities, where one can take for granted that there will always be other people around. There’s something comforting about city life for introverts: you can be left alone, thanks to all the little rituals city people have for preserving minimal levels of separateness in a crowd, but you’re never totally isolated, and you’re always aware, as Dr. B says, of all these other people leading their lives, many of them not like yours, so you can be relieved that you’re not the only weirdo out there. You can be your independent self, but you don’t lose the interconnection. If that makes sense.

Anyway, I’m still thinking this through. So let me talk for a while about Baltimore, where I spent the better part of my childhood, and maybe that will explain some of what I’m wanting to say.

(To be continued in the next post.)

This is what my November 2nd looked like:

6:45 a.m. Alarm goes off for the second time, conclusively waking me up. I stagger out of bed to the sounds of NPR hosts saying "It’s ELECTION DAY!"

8:00 a.m. Breakfasted, caffeinated, groomed, and dressed, I head out the door, pausing to grab a warm jacket that later turns out to be completely unnecessary on an unusually warm and mostly cloudless day.

8:15 a.m. I arrive at my local polling place. It’s surprisingly quiet, with only a few people in line. There’s a momentary hold-up: apparently, since I registered by mail, they want a proof of my address as well as my voter card. Fortunately, I’ve come prepared with my electric bill. The poll workers at the table look relieved and apologize for the inconvenience. Another shows me how to work the touch-screen in the voting booth. I ask if the machines provide a paper receipt, and the poll worker says no, but there’ll still be a paper record locked inside the machine, which they’ll use in the event of a recount. Satisfied, I punch the four boxes on the screen, hit "Cast Vote," and I’m out of there, sporting my "I Voted" sticker.

8:35 a.m. Crossing the street on my way to work, I pass a small cluster of students who are holding up Kerry/Edwards signs and waving at passing cars. I grin broadly at the girl nearest me. She looks at my sticker and says "Yay!" and I say "Yay!" in response. We smile at each other and I walk on.

8:45 a.m. Arrive at the library. My colleagues are all wearing "I Voted" stickers of their own. We compare early-morning-voting notes. Everyone else’s polling places were jammed, so we conjecture that my precinct has a greater proportion of students, most of whom don’t have to be at work by nine.

10:00 a.m. Sit in on meeting. More comparing of early-morning-voting notes; more reports of jammed polls. Discussion turns to actual meeting for next hour and a half, which is something of a relief.

11:30 a.m. Meeting ends. I get coffee and a highly unhealthy donut from the library cafe, then head to my desk. Unsurprisingly, the Electoral Vote Predictor is awfully slow to load today.

12:00 noon. First reference shift of the day. Some, but far from all, people in the main hall of the library are wearing stickers.

1:00 p.m. Lunch hour. Weather’s still magnificent, so I mosey across Grounds eating my tomato sandwich and head to Heartwood Books for some browsing. (I find Elizabeth Bishop’s letters and Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God. It’s a good used-bookstore day.) The store owner sees my sticker and asks what the turnout was like. More comparison of notes (see above).

2:00 p.m. Very quiet hour staffing the information desk in our new building. No major news to be found on the web except "huge turnouts everywhere."

2:30 p.m. or thereabouts. My sticker falls off. I reaffix it.

3:00 p.m. Back at the reference desk. More people seem to have voted. I was kind of hoping for last-minute questions about how to find one’s polling place, but there aren’t any. People are starting to report big turnouts in other places in Virginia. I don’t expect Kerry to win here, but the sheer numbers are encouraging. Afterwards, I go back to my desk and attempt to do some reading and research, but with my mind elsewhere.

6:15 p.m. I catch the bus home. A handmade sign inside the bus reads "VOTE!" I sit behind a group of guys who’ve evidently been playing soccer or ultimate frisbee or something of the sort, if their muddy shirts are any indication. One is describing how he waited fifteen minutes for the man in front of him at the polls to finish voting. (Some voters remain undecided to the last? But I suspect it’s more likely to be due to the two state constitutional amendments on the ballot, both rather minor and obscure and couched in legalese.)

6:25 p.m. Home again. I’m starving. I cook some salmon on a bed of rice, make a salad and pour a glass of wine.

7:00 p.m. Election coverage begins. I sit down with my dinner to watch. Virginia election results aren’t in yet. (Update: they just called it. Virginia’s gone red. Oh well.) Faint sounds of music can be heard outside my window — some of my neighbors are evidently marking the occasion by throwing a party.

Without knowing the ultimate outcome: I’m impressed with how calmly everything went today. No inter-party hostility that I could see, no polling shenanigans, no flaring tempers, no doomsday scenarios. That’s what I’ll be holding onto for the rest of the evening. And with that, I’m signing off so I can call a few friends in other states and hear what their own election day was like.