Category: The Friendly City

She sits on an island between two streams of traffic, where Liberty Street and Main Street converge. Three flags rise above her. Bronze, sad-eyed, she extends her arms in a gentle, open posture, her head slightly bowed, compassionate, contemplative, and resigned.

In the relentless heat, one thinks about the future. It’s hard not to wonder where it’s all going, what next summer will be like and the summer after that, walking down Washington Street in the hot, glazed afternoon toward the housing developments on the edge of town.

If you know the Friendly City, you are familiar with its smallest house, tucked into an alley against the wall of the Finnigan’s Cove restaurant. At the moment, the main features of this tiny domicile are a pair of gazebos (one crushed), a white picket fence, a front door, and a window with green shutters.

“Towns,” writes the poet Anne Carson, “are the illusion that things hang together somehow.” Today on Collicello Street, the illusion is particularly strong.

The city bakes under the heat dome. In the suffocating weather, we become night walkers, transferring our outdoor time to the hours of darkness. We go out at nine p.m. when the sun no longer burns, though the air is still close, heavy and enveloping like a fur. It’s not quite dark.

Surely this is the most pleasant environment for walking: a shifting patchwork of brightness and dimness, a quilt of light.

The June heat brings changes to the soundscape of the city. Winter is muffled and still; summer is loud, crackling, brash, and tuneful.

There is a house in my neighborhood we call Finnegans Wake, after James Joyce’s famously dense, fantastically challenging novel. During his many years of writing this book, Joyce called his manuscript Work in Progress—a name that suits my neighbor’s unpredictable, chaotic residence.