mid-summer neighborhood walk

We headed over to Whole Foods for the makings of dinner: a few strips of hearty applewood bacon, baby spinach, fresh halibut fillets. Here are photos from the early evening walk.


It began with Sheba lazing on a neighbor's car. Rough life, I know...C calls this her pirate face. Really it was the end of a huge yawn.

Pretty flower before the state flag.





Home of my occasional Saturday morning splurge, un pain au chocolat.




My favorite intersection and the BEST record store ever.





Again, BEST record store ever, but an inside shot this time.






Angel watching over West Sixth Street...





This pictorial neighborhood tour wouldn't be complete without the requisite liquor store and unofficial landmark that points the way to our little shoebox.

proud parent

If Sheba were my child, this is the "school portrait" I would carry with me in my wallet.

rude awakening

It's just before 4am Saturday morning and I am asleep, as are the majority of people in the world. C says I have supersonic hearing or something, because I have this uncanny ability to overhear conversations that are several feet away, despite various background and ambient noises. This also makes me a fairly light sleeper. I wake when Sheba ventures onto the kitchen countertop -- it's something about the sound of her weight hitting the '70s style yellow Formica.

So it's alarming when I'm rudely awakened by an uncommon noise - one that I can't immediately pinpoint but I know it has something to do with glass. Not necessarily glass breaking, but something hitting glass. I immediately sit up, slowing focusing on the glass-bottomed hookah I smuggled over from Qatar many years ago whose purpose has been relegated to holding open my bedroom door. Nope - still upright and in tact. What the hell was that?

C, who could sleep through a freight train paving a new path through our little shoebox, perks up too. Suddenly, it becomes clearer. Masculine groans from just outside our window - a mere six feet from where I lay. C jumps up to peer out the blinds, trying to piece it all together. A slow-groaning "help" coupled with several "owws" make it much more real. Someone is laying outside our window, hurt.

Now here's a little visual to help you better understand -- outside our long and narrow bedroom window is a thin, say two feet wide, concrete path leading to the back of the tiny complex. Surrounding that path is a concrete retaining wall that helps keep our sloped parking lot from crumbling down into our tiny abodes. This wall is about three feet wide, open on the left side (closest to my window) and bound by a flimsy cyclone fence on the right, nearest the parking lot. In semi-Vonnegut style, here's a photo:

Once we figure out that there's someone in pain outside our window at 4am, we decide to investigate. I hear a cautious female voice suddenly, and realize that one of my single young neighbors must have beaten us outside. This makes me uncomfortable, so C and I rush out to the parking lot.

This is where it gets even weirder. There is my female Rastafarian neighbor with two clean-cut, late 20-something males, all with beer in hand. The three of them are attempting conversation with a slightly younger, equally clean-cut man who is picking himself up off the narrow paved walkway. We walk in mid-sentence - something about filming a stunt, the roof, etc. I look at Rasta, confused, my 4am-self only able to sputter, "What?"

Long story short -- Rasta had been hanging out with the two clean-cut men on their porch directly across the street from our complex, on obviously higher ground. From there, they noticed a shape dancing about on the flat, ridiculously accessible roof of ours. A few seconds later, the dancer, from here on out known as "Alex", noticed the three and bolted suddenly, landing with a loud thud on the pavement outside our window some 25 feet below.

Now Alex is obviously on something, with pupils that remind me of Sheba mid-hunt. When I ask him if he's hurt, he shakes it off like he just tripped over his shoelaces. "No, I'm fine. We were just filming a stunt."
"Wait, who was filming a stunt?"
"Me and my friends."
"No one's here but you. Where are your friends?"
"We were just filming a stunt, no big deal."
"Okay, but you're supposedly filming this 'stunt' on private property at 4 o'clock in the morning and fell off the roof. That's not normal behavior."
"I'm fine. I'm just going to walk to Lamar (Blvd.)" -- and he heads west. Um, Johnny Knoxville, Lamar is east.

We all watch, totally stunned, as he heads off in the opposite direction of his supposed destination. He's slow and shaken, but with no visible signs of having just dived off a two-story roof onto concrete. I'm concerned, but don't really know what to do. Why can't I immediately wake up ready to deal with bizarre situations like this?

I talk a few more minutes with Rasta and the neighbors. Somewhere in the regurgitation of the last 10 minutes' worth of events, I realize something. Alex wasn't wearing any shoes. Actually, I clearly remember him pulling off his wet black socks as I first started speaking to him. This just leads to more confusion.

At this point, I notice Alex has doubled back and is now heading toward Lamar, for real this time. He's still slow, and every few feet he stops and looks at the ground. I'm half expecting him to just topple over suddenly. I'm afraid he's hurt and I'm not sure what the best decision is. [This feeling is precisely why I'm afraid to have kids.]

We walk back inside. Neither C nor I can shake the feeling that we shouldn't have let him walk off. All my crime-show expertise comes flooding into my head - what if he's got internal bleeding or he's so high he just can't feel whatever wounds he's got. At that moment, C grabs the car keys and we both understand that we're going to look for him.

It only takes about three or four minutes to find him. He's standing alongside Sixth Street, almost completely IN the street. He's trying to stand still, but he can't help swaying. I pull down a side street just past him and turn off my headlights. C dials 911 as I watch Alex cross the usually busy four-laned street into a high-end rug retailer's parking lot. As C gives the operator the back story, Alex slowly settles into a parking spot, first sitting and finally laying down flat. I'm worried, but we're getting him help.

Less than five minutes later, a fire truck from our neighborhood firehouse pulls up alongside me and I point Alex's motionless body out. Right then, two cop cars and an ambulance pull into the parking lot as well. There's help here now, but I can't help feeling like a tattletale.

After explaining the story to one of the cops, he tells us that he's going to "haul him off to jail because he's obviously wasted." I mention that our main intention is to make sure he's physically okay but whatever. He thanks us for helping out and walks back over to Alex, who's surrounded by firemen, EMS workers and two cops. C & I watch from the golden Jeep some 100 feet away. I worry that he'll be angry and maybe retaliate with his "friends" when he gets sober. But I realize that he can retaliate all he wants, but neither of us could live with ourselves if we let him wander away and something bad happened to him.

Several minutes later, the surprisingly chipper cop returns, telling us that although he wanted to take him to jail, EMS workers wouldn't let him, as Alex is not drunk but high on something. EMS is concerned that there might actually be physical harm from his fall and that he just can't feel it right now. They strap him to a gurney and load him into the ambulance -- a several hundred dollar ride. I hope Alex has insurance.

It took a couple hours for me to go to sleep after that. I wasn't so concerned that he had been trying to do anything malicious, but I couldn't help thinking of what the other outcomes could have been. What if he had been a skanky, coked out druggie like the peeping Tom C caught a couple years ago. Or what if he'd truly hurt himself and it had been much more graphic and gory. Or worse, what if he'd died, leaving C & I to find the body early in the morning.

I'm better now that it's light outside, truly thankful that none of those negative possibilities occurred. Right now my only thoughts are how amazingly achy that poor boy must be.

i have to point this out...

because it's totally not something I expected to see as an advert on my particular blog. Did anyone else notice the ad on the bottom right looking like this:

for some very inventive product called the Flatulence Deodorizer? That's what I get for writing an entire post on smells!

living vicariously through bare windows

Several nights a week, my evenings are capped off with a leisurely stroll around my old West Austin neighborhood, known for one reason or another as Clarksville. Even in the heat of the summer, dusk brings with it cooler temperatures that make walks more than bearable but craved. I love that the comfortable couples and old-fashioned residents appreciate bare windows -- it allows me to catch glances of lives other than my own.

Last night's walk led to an odd but happy discovery. It started in the park, where most days teams of 20- and 30-something neighbors battle it out old-school style with rowdy kickball games and other, less active types tend to the small but lucrative garden. The city pool here is tiny, a simple circle that's probably 20 feet across and a mere 3.5 feet deep, with one lonely lifeguard on duty. The dog run, a prime spot for effortlessly meeting people, has been empty lately due to the monster bulldozer reconfiguring the area. I sat on one of the swings at the hillside playground-- a hands-down favorite childhood escape that now, sadly, makes me nauseous in about 2.9 seconds. While sitting there, quietly appreciating the changing colors of the evening sky turning to night, C & I noticed two school-aged boys tiptoeing toward the center of the open field. They bent down, and in the dark of night, it was hard to make out anything other than the rough outline of their two bodies. Soon they took off running, taking cover behind the vines of the nearby garden. Seconds later, a green and pink explosion led to giggles followed by a mad dash to get out of the park. I, however, stayed on my swing, much too comfortable to react to child's play. It took a minute or two before the walk's "discovery" began, when slowly the burnt, powdery smell of the used firecracker made it to the swings. Instantly I thought of the last time my family played with fireworks, probably 20 years ago. This summertime smell, accompanied by another familiar aroma of freshly cut grass, was the start to an evening of olfactory reflection.

We left the park and headed north, into the darkest part of the neighborhood but also the best for glancing in bare living room windows. As we crossed into the street, I smelled roly-polys. Now C says he has no clue what roly-polys smell like, but for some reason, I feel like I do. The only way I can explain it is as an earthy, dirt-like smell that reminds me of early evenings in the backyard as a kid, digging for worms and making mud pies. I vaguely remember playing with pill bugs as well (aka roly-polys), flicking them so they roll around the sidewalk and then pushing them along into the grass so they don't get trampled by pedestrians.

Just two houses down the street, I admired a modest, well-kept house with an odd but creative layout. Rather than a traditional front door and entryway, the home opens into a massive, wide-open kitchen...I've never seen anything like it before. And, as a woman who would happily live in one monster kitchen if it was amply outfitted, I was slightly jealous. From this house wafted the oh-so-perfect smell of freshly-laundered clothes. It almost gave me the chills, it was so yummy.

As I noticed this smell and commented aloud, C mentioned that someone, possibly the lucky owners of my new favorite house, was grilling a perfectly seasoned, juicy steak within a few feet of us. Ugh - what a life! Having lived in a quaint albeit TINY shoebox apartment with a fantastic but itty bitty courtyard and a stupid anti-grill policy, we've been craving grilled steaks for oh, I'd say 3.5 years. And here I'd found quite possibly the best kitchen AND a medium rare steak ready and waiting.

But we trudged on despite the pull of this little house. And a couple minutes later, as we passed a convertible Audi parked oddly in front of the one out of place, desolate looking house on the street, I was immediately struck by a smell I hadn't encountered in at least 15 years -- watermelon Bubblicious. Just saying those two words makes my mouth water and my blood sugar spike simultaneously.

It took several more blocks--past fancy Jeffery's and the blooming corner nursery, beyond our last-minute grocery stop, Fresh Plus, and back among homes again--before I came across the final smell of the night. As we talked about the older architecture of this particular section of the neighborhood, I immediately noticed the smell of old, slightly musty library books. As soon as the words rolled off my tongue, C agreed. As a child and young adult who absolutely loved the library and all the sensory experiences there, it didn't surprise me much that I'd come up with that thought in this area of Clarksville.

As we made it back home, I began to realize how many memories came up with each odd recognition. That's exactly what makes these nighttime neighborhood walks so much fun.