Six

Stopping but still moving and smelling the pine from old wood floors as you step on to the platform to the northbound train. As it begins to move you see the paned windows from an old warehouse building. Above the roof, some broken, some painted in dull whites and blue greys. The sunlight is casting through the shadows created by other shapes.

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Riding just before evening through the old neighborhood with large Victorian mansions and old brick apartment buildings with interesting names like Roanoke. The frontages are two stories high and about 40 feet wide but they go way back, almost 200 feet, and the passerby doesn’t see this. When you walk in to the foyer it feels like you’re in a hotel with no lobby. Very quiet with old wooden floors indented with the passage of time. A reminiscence of some time with friends or friends of friends who knew someone once who lived here. And now you are at the friend of a friends place, so many years ago, in the old Colonial Homes complex built for returning World War II veterans, an artist who had a painting of a man covered in ants leaning against the wall. The apartment smelled of hash and was dark and amber mixed with yellow white. I remember some art deco shapes, but maybe it was from somewhere else I was that evening or a few days before, in midtown. His girlfriend was out and working at the old coffee shop bookstore that is now gone.

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The build up of multiple generations of music and styles stacked on top of each other like sediment over millennia. Or a brush stroke, all lines moving together in one joint movement, working together to create a statement of a time, a mood, that is well defined in everything you see while looking out the window into the square. No square in particular but one paved in cobblestone.

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I was doing apprentice work for a lawyer named Arvind who worked from home. His upstairs hallway was a library and led to a room dedicated to a resistant in the Warsaw ghetto. One morning I walked upstairs and Hitler was there in traditional Austrian garb. He had a young boy with him and was commenting on some photo of a very large steep hill that he had once hiked on. I went back upstairs and came up again later. This time he was with a woman, dressed in the same style, and he was singing a Bavarian song, smiling, and then we talked. He was laughing about getting some produce from a supermarket, something about a bursting cauliflower vegetable. I walked away and went back downstairs.

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The bird chirping in the young tree along the path was doing so very loudly and was hidden quite well. I think it was a prank.

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There is the cool smell of fresh mason work drafting out of a building being renovated on Peachtree St. as you pass from Downtown into Midtown. It mixes with the warm old street air. There is something restorative about it, like a fountain. The cement cool smell of fresh grey shades with the breeze just before sunset in the shadow of the buildings is so appealing. There is something obscurely but firmly romantic about it.

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