It was a strange day, full of puzzling gifts, occasioned by helpless gratitude. So I had to wander. I woke up just before sunset, not knowing that I'd fallen asleep, and I felt the imperative inside me. I tied on my worn-out shoes and ran from the house.
I walked eastward, up the hill, over the freeway bridge. The sun was turning everything the color of ripe fruit; all the windows looked like stained glass. I smelled about twenty different dinners as I wove between 26th and 28th streets, and I saw the TV sets playing flat faces in flat colors. Across the ravine, the park had turned into Shangri-La, black and mysterious.
I love going out to wander when I know I'll be caught by the twilight. When the day exhales its final breath in a haze of car exhaust and jasmine fragrance, when the lights in the kitchens come on, when I can walk down the yellow line of the street with impunity, when the streets are so quiet you can hear people playing the piano from blocks away.
It turned dark when I turned on 30th Street and headed south, doubling back on my route rather than going in a complete circle, because I wanted to see the same neighborhood from a different angle. The bars were opening up; the back patio of Station Tavern was lit with a string of bulbs and children were playing under the tables; couples were walking their dogs. I saw a church for lease--a Mission-style edifice in white stucco, with green frames on the doors and windows. A jeep passed me, playing ranchero music at a respectful volume. The sky was lapis blue, like the time I got lost in a suburb of Buenos Aires, walking for miles trying to find my uncle's church, certain only that it was somewhere east of where I'd started from. The sky kept getting darker and darker blue, but it never turned black, not even when the stars were all out. And then I found that I'd passed it, and I turned back around and came in through the front door, and one of the girls ran to tell my uncle, who betrayed his relief only through the slight widening of his eyes when he saw me.
When I turned west again on A Street, I saw a square loft built over the roof of a house, and then I was on the terrace of the Cooles' house in Castle Comfort, in Dominica, in the Caribbean, surrounded by palm trees and banana trees, eating stewed breadfruit and tomatoes, smelling the sulfur that bubbled under the hillside as the dormant volcano began to pulse in the evenings, listening to the tambourine-punctuated music of the church at the bottom of the mountain, as their nightly revival meeting gathered steam. I saw Dr. Cooles dipping packaged wafers in his decaffeinated instant coffee, murmuring in assent as Sandra told me things about their life there, and the life they had left behind in England. I saw the faint light illuminating the spines of their thousands of books, ranked along the indoor walls as thickly as the vines that climbed around the house.
And as I came to the crest of the hill and began to make the descent toward 14th Street, I was suddenly in a place that is not past, but somewhere forward. I was on a porch, a wide front porch with low eaves, and I was bending over something--maybe a stereo, because the music from Buena Vista Social Club was playing. I had a white dress, like the one I tried on yesterday in the store, and my hair was tied up in the same scarf I was wearing, and there were earrings dangling under it like unripe fruit. There was light inside the house, and I was waiting for someone to come out, to join there me on the porch. I stood up and looked inside to see if someone was coming yet.
I love walking over the freeway at dusk, or at night. Any bridge is a good place when the sun goes down. It's a place to be still and absorb the motion of something else. I remember the Williamsburg Bridge at dusk, and also the Pont Alexandre III. No matter where I am, or where I am in my head, a bridge at nightfall feels like home. I can't, for the life of me, tell you why.
Something wonderful must be happening tonight, because in my apartment building courtyard, someone is playing the harmonica.
