I think in car-lengths nowadays mostly. Whenever I get a long enough stretch to just sit , I get to see the peculiar human confetti of Beverly Hills flutter past.
There was the day I saw the very tall, striking dreadlock-haired black man ride his bicycle. Against a sunny warm day, a balmy one, he was a kinetic sculpture of charcoal skin in a crisp cream linen suit, with most remarkable tan and beige boots of some expensive modern materials and design. They were an unusual streamlined shape. His boots of the future pedaled and pedaled his bright red old 1950s bicycle, with fat black tires, sashaying in and around the pegs of t-shirted pedestrian traffic on the white sidewalk. He was a Viennese waltz without sound, and ee cummings would have said so much depended on his red bicycle.
There are the boney blondes. So many many blah blah blah blonde skeletal jewelry-and-clothes hangers, all on the same cell phones, all with the same dark haired boyfriends, all in the same tan cars. They murmur all around of money money money.
There is Ms. Pink. She must be an old maiden, but still wrapped in her slim girlness. Each clear morning she waits for the bus in her pale pink skin and demure red hair with a different ensemble of pink clothes glowing underneath her pink paper parasol. She exudes dignity even in her cacophony of pinks, being an older Ms. On St. Patrick’s, there she was again with her pink dress and her pink shoes and her pink sweater and her pink purse. And her green hat.
There is the grey woman. She paces. She tails people. She writhes like a banshee in her dirty grey blankets, flinging scrappy dark wisps of arms and cursing — somehow completely one dirty grey color everywhere, even her hair and face a strange ash. How long did it take her to get that way, I wondered. Had she started at white and gone through the spectrum to end in its negative? What purple despair had moved her off an edge to this invisible end?
But I saw some going forward today. I saw only the backs of two identically teal-sheathed med student girls, future nurses or doctors perhaps. In the shadow of an office building their large black bodies rolled along in stride, the left a waterfall of braids, the right all nappy poofs, teal sails waffling in the breeze. I thought about their future. How far their wind would blow them, how much farther than their mommas’. And as I saw their future, they dashed off in unison to grab it out of the world’s grudging hands. The bus came sooner than they’d thought.
Entries (RSS)