Several police cruisers, include state police, descended this morning onto a couple of homes on Oakland Street between Kensington Avenue and Bloomfield Street. That area is often very crowded during rush hours, and is easily gridlocked just after school lets out. The parked cruisers, some unmarked, were making a diffcult-to-navigate street even more difficult, because there really is no room to park at the curb. Some of the police appeared to have driven up onto the lawns—unless those cars belonged to the residents.
Much activity was taking place and it was hard to tell what was going on. As I crossed the intersection at Dickinson and Oakland Streets, walking children to school, the crossing guard commented to me that if it was a raid, maybe they could have done it at 3:00 or 4:00 am instead of waiting until everyone was trying to get to work and school. I told her that it was probably not a raid, for that reason, but who knows. She said she wishes the police would give her a dispatch radio so she could know what’s going on. Two residents who often stand on the corner with the guard, just to chat, were trying to gather all the information they could.
My children were very keen to see the action, but I shooed them along down the street toward the school. "There’s no crossing guard down there," they told me. I looked. True enough, the custodian has been out a lot this week, and he’s usually the one to act as crossing guard near the school. I saw them safely down the street and stood to observe the growing gridlock and police activity.
So much traffic passes down that street, it’s incredible there aren’t more accidents. I watch every kind of vehicle pass by. Some people, in the nicer cars, look frightened for their lives driving down derelict Oakland Street, with their eyes locked forward in their well-groomed heads. There was too much auto traffic to appreciate standing on the corner for long, even to try to overhear the police action, because a person begins to feel as though he is on stage for an audience of drivers, with no one else around on foot. Or the street is haunted, crowded by speechless ghosts and strange menageries, with no one living to keep company.
For refuge, I went back to the crossing guard for an extended conversation. She told me all about her neighbor being evicted, and how for several days in a row this week, the woman had left all her windows open and the lights on. She described in detail how the neighbor placed an overflowing trash bin under a window left ajar so that her two cats could climb in and out at will, and how she had placed a huge piece of plate glass on the tree belt, just waiting to be smashed.
These are the types of stories I can rely on the crossing guard to share with me, while the two residents who stand on the corner with her regale me with questions about whether my (formerly stray) cat is alright. The cat follows me, as a dog would, all the way to the intersection, and then waits there until I return to walk home with her. The previous morning, she became disoriented when I didn’t return promptly, and these folks were concerned. "She’s fine; she’s back," I assured them. "She knows the neighborhood better than we do," I added.
Looking across the way, I saw that someone had graffiti-tagged, in three places, the storefront in the works at 196-206 Dickinson Street. It must have happened just last night, because I didn’t think it was there yesterday. Workers were just arriving to continue their task of essentially rebuilding the entire facade of the building. At the end of each work day, they board it up again. Many varying patches of light-colored paint can be seen on the plywood used for the purposes, covering up other tagging efforts. These storefronts are like fire hydrants to the territorialistic in the area.
As I walked home, I spotted an unfamiliar man ahead of me a few blocks, glancing back at me, pausing, and going through his pockets a bit. He was so far ahead that I didn’t think I would overtake him, but within minutes, I did. He had a nervous air about him and my own radar was picking up on his uncertainty. He looked at me, with a fresh cigarette dangling from his lips. He seemed to be between 40 and 50 years old.
"Got a match?" he asked, standing aside a bit, to the left, near a vacant storefront. No one else was around, except for the occasional zooming traffic on Dickinson.
I thought of my fellow blogger Daniel Oppenheimer, who recently had a bad run-in with some folks in Wilmington, Delaware when he didn’t have a light. One of the guys asking gave him a punch in the face, out of nowhere.
"No," I said, trying to appear friendly, but feeling odd about this person’s approach, largely influenced by my thoughts of what happened to Dan. I slowed to a stop. The man had maneuvered himself over to the other side of the sidewalk, and appeared to be trying to get behind me. This was obviously a ploy to strike up a conversation, and felt like a ploy for something else, too, but I couldn’t tell what.
"Don’t smoke?" he asked.
"Nope," I said. He noticed that I was waiting for him to continue walking ahead of me, and got irritated.
"Oh, sorry!" he said, mockingly, and shuffled forward a little bit.
"That’s okay," I answered, smiling a little, nervous system going into high gear. What was this guy after? He walked ahead of me one or two paces, and I made sure to stay just behind him, walking very slowly. He turned back toward me.
"Getting ready for Christmas?" he asked, and turned to face forward again. Some impulse made me decide to catch him by surprise.
"Actually, I don’t celebrate Christmas," I responded. (I’m a Baha’i.) He jerked his head around to look at me abruptly.
"You don’t?"
"Do you?" I said, laughing a little, but not because I thought this was funny. I needed to find a way to end the conversation. The man had a feel to him like he wanted to know where I was going, or like he didn’t know why he was there.
"Oh, yeah, I gotta buy a present for my wife," he said. "This is my first year!"
I didn’t know what he meant. "Well, that’s a good thing to do," I said, having paused at my corner to indicate that I would turn here.
"No it isn’t," he said, looking at me in a challenging way, like he was searching for something he did not know where to find.
"Have a happy holiday," I said, and turned to walk up the street, feeling a charge running through me that said I had just escaped something weirdly dangerous. When I arrived at my home, I glanced back to see if I’d been followed. The man was gone.
