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| Barbara Roether With a child and without a car, I’ve walked around here a lot. South Van Ness, Mission, Valencia, Fair Oaks, Guerrero; street names I know deeply. For a few years when my son was one and two we walked over the hill and back three times a week on the way to his baby-sitter on the other side of Dolores street in Noe Valley. Being short, he was close to the words that were inscribed in the concrete before each street, its name, in mysterious hieroglyphics. Learning that the shapes incised in the concrete on each corner had names, he would bend over, extend a finger, and trace each one, moving along the grooves while reciting V-A-L-E-N-C-I-A. Sometimes, it seemed to me, the way he caressed each letter, that he brought the names to life, created them; other times, simply that he felt them like a paleontologist feels bones buried in the soil trying to put them together to find where in the world we are. Though his obsession with these letters hampered efforts towards locomotion, I stood and waited while he recited consonants. Passersby stared, but the air seemed bright and we walked that route so often that we knew the shapes of tree branches, bloom of hedges, the garages, the driveway at Fair Oaks where there was a big spider web, the exact square of sidewalk on Dolores, where once we walked by and a baby pigeon sat injured on the sidewalk, but was gone when we came home. And later, as we crossed that block of sidewalk each day he would explain to me, “The mother came and took the pigeon home.” And so, events begin to fill our way—a spider, a pigeon, the hill to run down. Until, through the hands and feet of my son, I was delivered to this neighborhood. Because our passing was a claiming and a pausing. As if to stop and greet.
Barbara Roether is a freelance
writer and editor. She is the managing editor
of Books Unbound, a book
packaging company that specializes in books
that address mind and spirit in the modern
world. She holds an
M.F.A. from Bard College. |