Criss-crossed

Same street, late at night, but west not east.

Same cars, but grills not license plates.

What turns us around? Makes our bearings falter and slip. Casts shadows of doubt across our eyes.

The 22 had dropped me off on Clark near Senn High. The neon and florescent lights were a paler sunshine illuminating my memory; subtle but sufficient. In a moment, I was a block closer... but to where? I paused, somewhat dumbstruck, what I realize now was but a 1/2 block from my courtyard. "Where the hell was I?" Reality and memory queasily flip flopped, leaving me momentarily beached on an uncertain piece of asphalt. For there I was, standing, one foot off of the curb, lost like a little kid wondering if he should cross the street.

I read once, not too long ago, that recent tests of memory had shown just how fickle and plastic they were. We 'see' but don't really. The familiar is constantly coloring our perceptions with ghosts, hauntings of former moments, distant places. It's a good defense mechanism in its way. Kicks up the reflexes to react instinctively to new situations, grasping at the familiar to guide our arses to somewhere where the predators won't roam.

Except ... it had failed me for that brief second last night.

After a slight pause I knew where I was and what was up, but for that split-second my world was a river of uncertainty until my conscious mind buoyed me back to the sea of the familiar.

Crossing the street, I thought back to a summer, just a few years ago when I was living on Spring Street in Ann Arbor. This neighborhood, on the sleepier side of a sleepy city, rolled up the sidewalk sometime after 10, when all Good Citizens finished supping and trundled off to the sleep of the Innocent. Not a person strolled, not a car rushed the streets. Frozen in time, edges blurred by streetlights filtered through the sprawling, whispering canopies of half-century oaks, it was all a dream. Allison and I would often trawl those back streets, ply the unused playgrounds and alleys for their secrets.

I still remember the night when we realized that we'd never seen a car on any of the streets in all the times we'd walked. A mischievous smile, a daring more perceived that filled with any true danger and we lay down on the ground where we had just stood. Staring up at the stars, I felt the warm asphalt abandoning its heat to the sky. The world seemed so different at that moment, the wheel of a car just barely an arm's length away, the trees overhead, the street at my back.

The street of now blended with the street of then and I realized it was all a matter of perspective.

It's one of those things that can only be elucidated after that moment of reflection; you find that string that joins all the separate events together. Perhaps it was only a matter of time that I pursued art as a career. But I realized that I'd been one after a fashion all of my life. One of the most important lessons my grandfather taught me when I was little was how to see. To squint and accentuate shadows (which drove my grandmother into fits), to hold something in your hand and feel its texture, it's length and breadth. But most importantly, to move it. To view it from different angles. It's top. It's bottom. Ah. And there it was...perspective.

When I was about 5 (I remember this because the Poseidon Adventure had just come out), I would go around my grandparents’ apartment with a mirror, tilted towards the ceiling so that it looked like the apartment was upside down. I probably did this all afternoon. And my grandmother probably laughed and shook her head. As she always did.

I was all about perspective shifts even then. Thanks, Irwin Allen.