It’s damned near 100 degrees in Richmond and my pin stripe slacks are rolled up close to the knee. I can make out lyrics about whiskey in between the guitar riffs, whiffs of smoke and white people woooos!! I’m back in the city where I was born.Richmond is an odd place for me now and I’m looking at the city with almost alien eyes. The places I grew up with are mostly gone or supersized with new ambitions. The empty downtown still has that characteristc emptiness but it’s being steadily filled by college students and skinny jeans, coffee shops and ad agencies. The 4x4’s are learning to share the street with fixed gears.
Gilpen Court is still the same hot ass hood, and Highland Park has taken on a sleepy nostalgia. The poor folks here are still poor and from what I can tell they’re rolling with the city changes by sitting on their front poorches-sipping something cold and standing lookout on the corners.
There’s one young hippie chick across the water, twirling a hula hoop round her neck and shoulders. I get a Golden Gate park flashback-some concert, some crowd, some other band playing for another slightly tipsy crowd as the sun goes down on the other side of the country.
I’m not sure if it’s the desire to connect with something familiar or something else, but I’m increasingly amazed by how the more I travel the more I run into situations that remind me of other situations-people that remind me of places back home, streets that remind me of walks I’ve taken with special people.
I’d like to think that that says something about human connections, about how we’re all a lot more alike than we’d like to believe. And for right now at least, I’m sticking with those thoughts. Reality is shaped, at least partly, by the things we believe and the things we feel.
And right now, as Brian Aubert picks through a particularly twangy tune and an old freight train chugs past the sklyline, I’m feeling very southern.
