So I was wearing this Budweiser shirt.
It's the kind that kind of hugs you at the bottom hem, so when you're walking, and you take a step, the one side kind of bunches a little while the other side kind of stretches a little, and then they change when you take another step.
Which I guess is a single piece of beauty in puberty.
It's funny, 'cause I walked there nearly every day last summer, and then hadn't seen it in over a year. This one piece of community this guy started a couple years ago.
I think the thing that impressed us most was that he really tried, you know? I mean, this isn't the kind of place where people try, believe me. They don't buy garden gnomes, or trim their trees, or get fancy rugs or any of that. We are not entrepreneurs. But this guy was.
Not only did he get this street-art mural done on the side of the store, and fix the cracks in the parking lot, he put out tables and chairs in the front. With umbrellas. And it wasn't because he had something to prove or anything. They were office chairs from thrift stores, situated at random next to the soggy dog bed by the door for the skinny German Shepherd everyone learned to call Roxy.
I guess it kind of just blew us away, you know? This meat market, produce store, candy shop kind of place where all the labels were in Spanish. And there'd be a pig head in one corner and popsicles in the other. And people would sit outside and park their horses and talk with the shop owner.
And he remembered me.
I kind of thought he wouldn't; so many people, you know. But I set down the strawberry soda at the counter and said "Hey," and he looked up and lifted his eyebrows and said,
"You've gotten tall in the past year,"
which is all anyone has ever greeted me with. I had almost thought I'd stopped growing for a while. The words came as a familiar comfort though, and the reassuring constant of change calmed me in the reality that nothing has changed.
There's very little beauty where I live. It comes in small pieces, and is usually gone unseen by the general public. And the ugliness wears on us, it does, and we forget about places outside the town, places where the flowers grow. The pieces of beauty the world was born with get buried along the busy roads.
But history cannot be buried.
A small, city-cut line ran under the street, fenced off from the broken bits of sidewalk alongside it. No one touched the line of stream and grass. It was rectangular, cement-floored, rock-sided. The water moved slowly, and the grass grew unmolested. Backyards touched either side, giving it about ten feet either way, lining it with fences of wood and wire.
I hopped the fence into the untouched territory.
Hopping the fence meant to touch a second of beauty - one small second, which the city hides away. You have to keep walking to reach it. Little hidden pieces, way back behind abandoned playgrounds and trees that used to be weeds.
I kept walking. Walking past yard after yard and barking dog after barking dog, until the water was just a paper-thin trickle against the concrete and the rocks started to look familiar. I thought of Lafflin. How he couldn't climb the rocks. I had to hold his shoes for him.
Eventually the line ended in a neighborhood I'd never seen before. Just a side street no one bothered to explore. I climbed over the other fence, and suddenly recognised that the city used to be beautiful. Which explained the old broken-down barn houses. The farmland built over. The old wire fences. The horses which still stubornly walk down the streets, like ghosts from a different time.
The water led to a marshy, city-owned property of red-winged blackbirds and cattails. The sky was stormy and the sun was going down, and the birds sat discussing the weather. Weeds grew along the fence, beautiful weeds, glorious weeds, and the second of fenced-off beauty slowly spread through the past, over the little hills and ravines which had been painted over through civilization.
And the single piece of beauty was a scar left imprinted on a world which held only ugliness. It was a memory of when all things were beautiful, and when no fences hid it away. When growth was left to change, and was thereby kept from changing.
We must fight for beauty, these days. Fight to find something invisible.
But us searchers sure do appreciate when we find it.
It's the kind that kind of hugs you at the bottom hem, so when you're walking, and you take a step, the one side kind of bunches a little while the other side kind of stretches a little, and then they change when you take another step.
Which I guess is a single piece of beauty in puberty.
It's funny, 'cause I walked there nearly every day last summer, and then hadn't seen it in over a year. This one piece of community this guy started a couple years ago.
I think the thing that impressed us most was that he really tried, you know? I mean, this isn't the kind of place where people try, believe me. They don't buy garden gnomes, or trim their trees, or get fancy rugs or any of that. We are not entrepreneurs. But this guy was.
Not only did he get this street-art mural done on the side of the store, and fix the cracks in the parking lot, he put out tables and chairs in the front. With umbrellas. And it wasn't because he had something to prove or anything. They were office chairs from thrift stores, situated at random next to the soggy dog bed by the door for the skinny German Shepherd everyone learned to call Roxy.
I guess it kind of just blew us away, you know? This meat market, produce store, candy shop kind of place where all the labels were in Spanish. And there'd be a pig head in one corner and popsicles in the other. And people would sit outside and park their horses and talk with the shop owner.
And he remembered me.
I kind of thought he wouldn't; so many people, you know. But I set down the strawberry soda at the counter and said "Hey," and he looked up and lifted his eyebrows and said,
"You've gotten tall in the past year,"
which is all anyone has ever greeted me with. I had almost thought I'd stopped growing for a while. The words came as a familiar comfort though, and the reassuring constant of change calmed me in the reality that nothing has changed.
There's very little beauty where I live. It comes in small pieces, and is usually gone unseen by the general public. And the ugliness wears on us, it does, and we forget about places outside the town, places where the flowers grow. The pieces of beauty the world was born with get buried along the busy roads.
But history cannot be buried.
A small, city-cut line ran under the street, fenced off from the broken bits of sidewalk alongside it. No one touched the line of stream and grass. It was rectangular, cement-floored, rock-sided. The water moved slowly, and the grass grew unmolested. Backyards touched either side, giving it about ten feet either way, lining it with fences of wood and wire.
I hopped the fence into the untouched territory.
Hopping the fence meant to touch a second of beauty - one small second, which the city hides away. You have to keep walking to reach it. Little hidden pieces, way back behind abandoned playgrounds and trees that used to be weeds.
I kept walking. Walking past yard after yard and barking dog after barking dog, until the water was just a paper-thin trickle against the concrete and the rocks started to look familiar. I thought of Lafflin. How he couldn't climb the rocks. I had to hold his shoes for him.
Eventually the line ended in a neighborhood I'd never seen before. Just a side street no one bothered to explore. I climbed over the other fence, and suddenly recognised that the city used to be beautiful. Which explained the old broken-down barn houses. The farmland built over. The old wire fences. The horses which still stubornly walk down the streets, like ghosts from a different time.
The water led to a marshy, city-owned property of red-winged blackbirds and cattails. The sky was stormy and the sun was going down, and the birds sat discussing the weather. Weeds grew along the fence, beautiful weeds, glorious weeds, and the second of fenced-off beauty slowly spread through the past, over the little hills and ravines which had been painted over through civilization.
And the single piece of beauty was a scar left imprinted on a world which held only ugliness. It was a memory of when all things were beautiful, and when no fences hid it away. When growth was left to change, and was thereby kept from changing.
We must fight for beauty, these days. Fight to find something invisible.
But us searchers sure do appreciate when we find it.
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