The World at 3 MPH

“Nobody Walks in LA.” A song done by Missing Persons came to my mind today. I had to drop off my car on Broadway in Pawtucket to get some work done and walked the two miles back home. I never walk now and haven‘t for years. I drive the four blocks to the Pakistani store if I want Tic Tacs.

You miss a lot when you drive. I think most of us have driven routes so familiar that we can do it thinking about what we need to do tomorrow and pay no attention to what we drive through. I can.

But, walking back home, I got to see things at a slower pace and up close. I passed by an old cemetery that was populated by people whose first names that are never used now. Edwin, Jedidiah and there was one Percival that was buried there. These guys died before 1920. Then as now, you can tell who had some cash and who didn’t. The larger and more ornate the headstone, the more bucks. Then you’d see a crop of little limestone headstones with just the first initial of the person followed by the last name. That entire poor family was buried about 30 feet from a main road and train tracks. The last one died in 1902. The headstones were no bigger than desktop computer.

As I went on, I walked past the rail depot of Teknor Apex. They were using these huge vacuum hoses attached under the train that sucked out the powdered polyvinylchloride into three 100 foot silos. You see rusting steel latticework , old hurricane fences and dandelions sprouting up alongside them. For once I didn’t smell plastic. I could as a kid when air quality measures were a joke. Teknor Apex is probably that last of the old sprawling acreage type factories here. The other businesses I saw were smaller, hole in the wall types. I had no idea there was a small apparel shop dedicated to evening gowns for beauty pageants. That and someone still trying to make a dollar doing typing services. That was odd to see.

What I see driving around here but pay no mind to are the young mothers walking their little kids. I passed a few and they talk to you! “Good morning!” one Mom said and I halted for a half second before I responded, a bit surprised. Wow, people you pass on the road can sometimes greet you.

And the smells. The only smell I get in my car are stale cigarettes, transmission fluid leaking from a quart bottle and that faint hint of gasoline. On the streets I was walking I was hit with smells I knew as a kid. There is a house here where the same rhododendron I remember as a kid is still growing and it’s in bloom. I had forgotten about that creosote smell railroad ties have, but it was drifting up to my face as I was stepping from one to the other. Finally, when I reached my neighborhood, that house on Legris St still has that huge pine tree oozing sap, and that was fuming in the morning air. I used to walk by that each morning on my way to school a few hundred centuries ago.

There is a world out there within a two mile radius of this house, and I had forgotten about it.

(and on a happy note, the tire place called me to let me know that the price they’re charging me for two tires and an alignment, is actually pretty fair!)