Notes from the Neighborhood

1.

Here I am, Saturday again, 1pm again, at my green metal table under the white funnel tent again. Surrounded by hunks of ice like polar rocks again. Watching the unfinished snowman guard his frozen lawn beneath a gray sky again.

But there’s more to see today. There’s always more.

2.

The snowman has company: amorphous blobs of snow and ice rising from the blank landscape. Like stalagmites or the trees in Dr. Seuss books, leaning and bulbous. Existing now, like us, for an uncertain and limited amount of time.

3.

The snowman himself is damaged, chunks blasted from his cold abdomen like lunar craters. For a moment I wonder why I keep thinking of him as a snowman. It’s just a soiled ball of snow after all, honeycombed by flexing temperatures and severe exposure. But his humanness is too obvious to ignore: a snowman flawed, isolated, abandoned by his creator, unfinished and facing the end.

Maybe that’s too much to project onto a ball of crystallized water.

4.

The lawn is roped off, which strikes me as oddly futile even though I know it’s a good-faith effort to protect the grass. Imagine having to break into a forest. Imagine a razorwire fence around Mount Everest. A tarp over the Pacific. The Everglades, closed for renovation. It wouldn't work. It’s impossible for us to Keep Off The Grass. Even here at Schenley Plaza, footprints beneath the rope suggest rebellion.

5.

I don’t know why I revert to lists when I write about this place. Maybe it’s because nature doesn’t inspire linear thinking. When I sit here long enough, my senses are more outspoken than my consciousness. Thoughts are punctuated by long intervals of clean silence. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind writing outside even as the ink in my pen begins to freeze.

6.

A trolley glides by, reminding me that this really is Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. His show was filmed a short walk from here. 

I don’t know how I feel about this. 

On one hand, Fred Rogers was a saint and I’m proud that the kindest television show ever produced came out of Pittsburgh. On the other hand it’s disappointing that that perfect neighborhood of his, with its leafy streets and friendly mailmen, was actually Oakland—the same place I had a gun held to my head for three dollars and a flip phone.

7.

Two men pass, holding coffees and discussing a scrap of paper. The plaza is many things to many people. A shortcut. A place to eat. A place to write or to start a snowman. A place to drink coffee and tell your friend about the amazing doodle you’d stuffed in your pocket and forgotten. About how you’d rescued it from your jeans right before you drowned them in the wash. About how you’d been stunned by the drawing’s quality, unconvinced you were even capable of drawing so well. About how you'd stood in the Laundromat and felt a warm rush of pride on a cold day, grasping your work and wishing your mother were around to see it.