East side, west side, all around. . . there are so many colorful and curious images to step over
on the storied sidewalks of New York! It’s especially resplendent in October.
First you have the many squarish metal covers that provide
entrance down, down into the steep hearts of darkness that live below street
level leading to the myriad storage cellars beneath the trendy and not so
trendy shops; these sidewalk “doors” range in hue from shiny, corrugated,
recently replaced light silver to dismal, overly stepped on bent, dirty
charcoal of a heavier, bygone material;
but they all make the same hideous, ominous, clanging sound when one
dares step on them directly, rather than scooting around in order to
save a precious second or two. I can never decide whether to take the dare and
chance being sucked into one of those doorways to Hades in mid air, or simply
slip around and be safe, though this maneuver may risk my bumping rudely into
strangers. Seconds do seem to count while racing along the sidewalks of a New York minute. Seeing how fast you can get on foot from one light to the
next, while squinting in the clear October sun as you dodge cars,
trucks and careening delivery bicycles, actually becomes a kind of quest, not just
a matter of expediency. You start to enjoy it, a kind of guilty pleasure under
a perfect blue sky.
As a kid I was especially fascinated by the subway grates
and the thrill of standing on one of these as a train roared by underneath.
This innocent joy was seconded only by the sparkling diamonds in the schist, or
engaging in the concentrated act of cautiously stepping over the cracks while
the leaves crunched underfoot.
But back to the present, and the more insidious, smaller stuff you scrupulously must avoid, utilizing
fight or flight responses that most natives actually have encoded in their DNA by
the time they reach toddler-hood: gum, once pink, now black (speaks for itself-
forget about ever using those shoes again); dog doo (a time honored city tradition
that maintains it will bring you luck- yeah, right. . . ); liquids of all sorts
from even more dubious sources (the spilled orange smoothies being truly among
the grossest). In short, it’s a mess out there.
Finally, there are the sidewalk sleepers and their piles of
Dickensian rags straight from a mid-Victorian set, a motley riot of faded
color jumbled together in a heap on a late autumn afternoon, under which a body lies crouched and which you can partially discern, still breathing; or in nicer weather,
the sprawl of sunny sidewalk sunbathers in various stages of disheveled dress
or undress on the littered beaches of Broadway.
A metaphor here, for sure, though I wish not explore. Just keep walking.
