The Sidewalk Surprises

Some weeks ago, I came across a woman of advanced age on the sidewalk. She used a cane and wore a backpack, and was walking down Orange Street toward East Rock Park. When she stopped to greet me, she noticed the pup on my leash, and, as most foot travelers, was eager to pet little Lucca.

While she did so, I resumed my digging for New Haven gold, defined here as a pedestrian’s daily discovery and illumination.

I began to snoop into the elderly woman’s life. It’s a habit of mine. I meet a fellow walker, and the questions fall out of my mouth. Most folks are quickly drawn in, for who doesn’t like to talk about herself especially in the Era of Who Cares?

(Yet, I admit. My passion to intrude is a malady that horrifies my grandchildren who worry I will be arrested when I engage toddlers in political discussions.)

Among the things the woman on the sidewalk told me: ​“I love walking in this neighborhood. You meet so many interesting people.” She didn’t specify whether I am one of them.

I said, ​“Yes, we do. Tell me, what street do you live on?”

“Oh, I don’t,” she said. ​“I used to live in New Haven. But I’ve been in Wallingford for years. I just like to come back here whenever I can to walk in the neighborhood.”

Well, dear reader, you may be relieved to know that I did not pry further, did not ask, ​“If you love it here, why did you leave it?” Perhaps I knew the answer.

Our city is expensive. Housing prices and taxes are too high for many, particularly seniors on fixed incomes. Some worry about crime, as they read of muggings and worse, even in areas considered safe. Otherwise, they’d retire here to take advantage of urban culture and the dividends of diversity.

The woman turned the conversation to a neighbor’s yard. Like almost all walkers in this vicinity, she had stopped to observe our block’s number one tourist attraction, a house with no lawn.

“It’s gorgeous,” she told me. ​“I wish more people had the taste and guts to do this.”

“Yes,” I said, but didn’t add that when the neighbor first got rid of her grass many years ago and planted nothing but flower beds, she heard complaints from landscape purists.

“It’s a bit of a neighborhood metaphor,” I said of our neighborhood, East Rock. In New Haven, life as we expect it is often upended by, among other things, in-your-face beauty and innovation.

Soon, the woman was ready to continue her walk. ​“Perhaps we’ll meet again,” she said. ​“I’ll be back, that’s for sure.”

Ah, the sidewalks in our city, paths to delight and illumination. On pleasant or subpar weather days, they are packed with humanity and, given the ebbing hereabouts of the pandemic, life renewed well beyond the measure of previous springs.

Sometimes Lucca and I sit on the front stoop and watch it go by, both of us occasionally infringe on the personal space of pedestrians.

The journalist in me, though I left full-time employment two decades ago, can never be satisfied. Who are these people? What makes them tick? What can I learn from them? For without learning, we are essentially without a pulse.

When Lucca and I are not on the stoop, we are out there ourselves, two sidewalkers, unearthing things.

“Lucca, look,” I say, knowing full well he will not make much of the miniature front-yard libraries, constructed by generous neighbors who cultivate the joy of literature, from which Suzanne and I have retrieved a variety of excellent books, and deposited volumes we owned that we think will be of interest to others.

“Lucca, to tell you the truth, Suzanne and I have even put books we’ve written in these little libraries, not so much out of charity but out of ego curiosity.

“Blessedly, they were all taken by readers, but not as quickly as the work of, say, Danielle Steel or even certain local professors whose works are full of erudition and indecipherable paragraphs.”

In these treasured places, I found Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. I was introduced to the magnetic Jack Reacher novels by Lee Childs, and Philip Roth’s first book, Letting Go (1962). I found volumes I used to have but now have again, such as William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which now has an honored perch on top of my toilet’s water tank. Lucca, we have discovered, is a book lover himself. In general, he prefers eating paperbacks rather than hardcovers.

But he seems indifferent to other printed material, such as the dozens of Black Lives Matter signs in East Rock. ​“This is certainly not a neighborhood,” I said to Lucca, ​“in which Marjorie Taylor Greene, or one of that crowd, would ever bid on a house. So, we don’t have to search very hard these days for good news, do we?”

In recent days, the pup and I have watched little people wearing face masks walk hand in hand with parents on their way to the Worthington Hooker Elementary School on the corner of Canner and Livingston. The kids seem eager to get back to something called a classroom.

They have chalked on the steps of the school, ​“Teachers Are Amazing. Thank you!”

True, interactions with children sometimes bring surprises, and illustrate the unusual population mix.

One morning, I saw a small boy walking with his mother. The boy was pushing the stroller in which, I presumed, he had been sitting. Little kids love to do that. I asked him about it. But he did not answer. I thought, well, he’s probably taught not to speak to strangers.

Then his mother said, ​“Please understand. We just moved here, and so far he only speaks Portuguese. He’s too shy to try his English.”

No such silence occurs when you walk a dog on a leash. There seems a special camaraderie in this. ​“What breed is she?” I might ask, as I am new to the pooch game. This usually sets off a conversation in which, if I am lucky and persistence, I will learn the dog-walker’s shoe size.

Walks may bring you past outdoor tables of coffee shops and restaurants, where you can jaw with people who otherwise would enjoy an uninterrupted experience.

At the new Atticus market, I found a young couple studying computer science in college.

But if I had any inclination to categorize them as technology nerds, when the subject of Vienna came up, though I don’t recall exactly how, the fellow said he’d recently read a book in Finnish about that European cultural capital.

A walk on State Street in the evening might bring you to the sidewalk tables spilling out of The Tavern. There, you may see orders of a favorite appetizer, grilled octopus, which may intrigue you, or, in the case of a certain unnamed person in my household, gross you out. (But, if so, how can oysters be so necessary to her?)

But there is something else that has emerged as Covid-19 retreats, smiling faces. I know this is hard to believe in a city that was ranked in 2016 by Conde Nast as the sixth coldest in America in terms of friendliness. (Newark, according to the publishing company, is the most frigid, Charleston the most welcoming.)

These days, I seldom return from a vigorous walk around the block with Lucca without the warmth of some human interaction, and thinking I’ve learned something, either about someone, or about the nature of things, or about a hard-headed but loveable dog, or about something I’d seen a dozen times but never really stopped to notice.

I recognize that I may be labeled as one of those creepy old folks who roam the neighborhood, mischief on my mind. But, as we age, we assign more value to the lives of others and want to know how they navigated through the obstacles that appear in every life.

I’m tired of going to funerals and memorial services and learning fascinating things I didn’t know even about dear friends while they were alive. I want to know about people now, before they perish, and before I retire my curiosity, which I hope never happens.

We are not, by nature, listeners. We talk over each other. It infuriates me when at a dinner party guests interrupt and refuse to let the person holding forth finish the sentence. I admit I have sometimes done this myself. But I am always wary.

Writers notice everything: the cigar stubbed out on the street, the color of the lipstick left on the martini glass, the body language that may betray the spoken word. And sometimes, it takes a while to understand the truth.

Such as the sign on a neighbor’s yard. ​“Flying Lessons: By Appointment Only.”

For months, I thought it might be serious, until I finally noticed the broom handle.