Visited a Resource project, yesterday, in Philadelphia with our youngest child. She had heard that they were selling pews from a 19th C. church and thought one would compliment her furniture in their living room. M went out for lunch with her, last week, or maybe it was shopping .... to go into the less high-brow sections of the city there was still a function for Dad. My daughter's younger kids stayed with their Dad and Grandma M, their oldest at a center for talented writers, as we wound our way through the White, African American and Hispanic sections of the Big City ... indeed, to a place not far from where I ran a school for disturbed inner city high schoolers 40 years ago. (Just had opportunity to publish a memoir of that experience in a volume on Education edited by Michael O'Loughlin ... another remembering ... akin to this Playful blog about the Fourth Quarter).
We arrived having travelled through the alive and teaming parts of the cities ... places where people still go out to meet each other in the summer on the stoops that are just like those I once sat upon and under sprinkling fire hydrants which I do not recall. Actually, my most vivid memories of the Deep South I was born into ... South Brooklyn ... Coney Island, to be precise ... are the smells. There were many cats roaming or prowling (depending on how you feel about cats) and waiting for one of the midweek days ... Wednesday or Thursday ... when the horse-drawn fish monger and his truck would come to W. 5th Street. He would travel our side of the street from the corner which housed a saloon with rumored "bedrooms" upstairs to the other corner where Abe and Minnie sold candy up front and ran numbers in the back. Nice old couple ... nothing like Bonnie and Clyde!
If someone ordered fish, the fish man would pull the victim out of the ice chest near the back and prepare it ... gut it ... on a cutting board that was at the very back of the wagon. The heads and entrails would be gifts to the cats who would greedily take their booty to parts unknown. The smell lingered ... hell ... the smell lingers, today, as does the image from the stoop ... the bus terminal with its caged but broken windows across the street.
How different than the empty, shut-windows, air-conditioned suburbs in which my children were raised ... with but the occasional appearance of someone mowing a lawn or with the smells of cooking seasoned flesh arising from the backyard barbecues. I suspect my neighbors have long known about my feelings towards Suburbia ... and, anyhow, 'you can take the kid out of the ghetto' but you can't stop the neighbors from saying 'there goes the neighborhood' when he moves in.
The Resource Exchange was a wharehouse reclaimed by some artists ... indeed, the bearded man we worked with for the pews had attended Tyler Art School where I taught for many years (not as an artist but as a Mathematician) ... he arrived in the years after I had retired. The wharehouse was full of the discarded functional pieces of a world that didn't pay much attention to the old or outdated. Lamps, Cabinets, Stage Lights, Empty Picture Frames and many other sorts of nearly-lost objects, including a Confessional. Oh! How I longed to buy that confessional, though in the end I settled for a pew which the young craftsman will cut down for me a bit. I could move back and forth ... confessing and forgiving ... "My Father" .... "My Son" .....
What an afternoon ... back to familiar smells of living and sights of children playing in the streets. Bopping around with my youngest (who, not so young any longer, also shares my office) and bantering without any of the usual department/furniture store shtick and snarkiness with a young visionary who saw purpose in saving things from their unnatural ends in dumpsters.
Before I knew about Antique Boutiques, my Mom and Dad would take us to then-called "Junk Shops" to look for those wood and brass treasures that adorned their shelves at home ... It was my job to polish the brass.
The Old and the New flow together ... everything flows together ... Roll on! Roll on! Manongahela! Roll on to the Ohio! Roll on past Allequippi ... Down to the Mississippi ... Clear to the Gulf of Mexico!
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