Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Is This Supposed to Make Me Hungry?
She’s one of the neighbors who say “hi.” In this neighborhood we get a lot of shortimers and a lot of old-timers. She’s an old-timer. Small but not tiny; dark hair shot with white, but not actually grey; she lives in the pale green edwardian place up at the corner. I see her many mornings, stomping her cute little way down the sidewalk with her black and crimson walking coat and a low conical straw hat ... she always gives me a big smile and a wave and a few words of garbled salutation: “Morning! Bright! Cold! Work! Good!” I’m just off to catch the bus, or sometimes I’m shlepping the dog around the block, so I don’t dally to test the limits of her fluency or her friendship - but her cheerful greetings have long been among my favorite things about living here. She just seems so doggone authentic, yet she hails me as a fellow traveller. Hell, grandma downstairs doesn’t even recognize me on the sidewalk and I’ve lived here under her roof for more than a decade. It’s nice when the li’l old Chinese lady recognizes a white devil like me and says hello.
A few days ago we encountered our friendly old neighbor outside as we walked the dog. I didn’t recognize her at first - my comment to Kel was just “it appears we are entering the realm of the woman who squats.” For squat she did, in the middle of the sidewalk in a demure green sweater and baggy cotton pants. As we walked closer I realized who she was, but that left another mystery: what was she squatting next to? Out by the greenbelt I have seen more squatting than I’d care to relate or you’d care to read about, but it was usually either furtive or pissdrunk. But this friendly neighbor had something else going on. She was squatting by something, something she’d laid out on the sidewalk. As we drew closer she glanced up at us and nimbly hopped to her feet, favoring us - not with her usual smile of yellow teeth and wide gaps, but rather with a serious demeanor.
On the sidewalk, laid out on a series of squares of paper towel, were her breasts. About ten or twelve chicken breasts, bone down, skinless, with pale lumps of fat glistening in the shaded and penetrating chill of the morning. We said “good morning”; she did not return the greeting. We walked past and she quickly dropped back to her haunches, closely observing her raw meat as it sat on its paper pads on the sidewalk.
We got back home ten or twenty minutes later to see she’d switched sides of the street - she now exhibited her mats of uncooked poultry on the east sidewalk where, it seemed to me, she might get more sunlight over the next several hours. I’m not clear that that was why she moved, but it seemed to be a resonable hypothesis. Frankly I don’t know what she was up to. It was pretty surreal; even the dog didn’t seem to want much to do with the sidewalk meat display. I’m thinking of asking her what she was doing next time I see her. Then again, if life must endure in the face of mystery, maybe I’ll let this one resonate for a while, settle down into the mythology of my neighborhood. I’ll just ruminate on sidewalk breasts a little longer on my own, and see if they lead me anywhere. I mean, other than the obvious.