Left At The Cock And Balls

You know that thing where they take down a house in your neighborhood and a day later you can't even remember what was there? It turns out if they do a good enough job of it, they can take away your ability to find your way home. They can knock out your entire navigation system.

One of the good things about living in the same place for forty-three years is you can find your way home in the dark. With your eyes shut. Three sheets to the wind with an off-key song in your heart and a flat tire. Anyway, that's what I've heard.

You don't have to creep down the avenue looking for the cross-street signs. You know where you live and you don't have to think about it, which is an advantage in any situation, and getting to be more important all the time. In my case, when I'm driving home, I don't have to think about it. I hang a left after the cock-and-balls and just before the jacking-off monkey.

I did not notice the cock-and-balls originally but once it was pointed out to me there was no other way to see it. It's a sign for a Mexican café, a proud, rigid column with a big round flower on the bottom. The tacos are just fine, no need to examine the sauce. The monkey from the coffeehouse has to answer for himself. He knows what he's done.

 

 

Anyway this is all something you tuck away in the periphery of your vision. But apparently the entire intersection is involved. Because when someone takes off all the siding on the building on one corner and then whisks away an entire large concrete building on the other and replaces it with a smooth coat of gravel, you can shoot right by your own street and miss it altogether, even after 43 years, dead sober. If you're a certain kind of person, you can then travel several blocks before it occurs to you to wonder where you're headed and why. You might even, if you're a certain kind of person, keep going hoping something will pop into view that will remind you why you're in the car. Maybe, for instance, you were going to the hardware store. If a hardware store shows up, then you can park and wonder what it was you wanted.

 

Certain kinds of people are afflicted with such a rich interior life that they are able to sail through their days on cruise control, oblivious to suffering, woe, other people, or one's own personal whereabouts or coordinates. There are quilt blocks to design, novel scenes to write, and music running in a loop. Such a person probably should not be driving. But definitely, if such a person is not to get lost or mislaid, buildings should not be whisked away, willy-nillly. 

 

I'll tell you what, it didn't take too long to bring that big concrete sucker down. It had been vacant for at least 43 years. It was just a place for dogs to pee and kids to express themselves with spray paint. In one day a massive backhoe knocked it down and scooped it up and then it was 1600 square feet of level gravel, without even a memory attached.

 

It's alarming to realize how much of our daily life doesn't require paying any attention at all. An entire nation can blunder along without having to notice what keeps us safe, what we stand for, the civic contract that doesn't exist except that we all agree to it, the frailty of the scaffolding of our civilization, until it's threatened or gone. With any luck and some time, we'll still find our way home.