Ah, fricken Monday. I woke up and could not see until the steam of cawfee hit my face. Is this what happens when you are about to turn 40?
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I feel grateful…
My streets are a place of history and of flux, streets of gold and streets of survival. I am lucky to have a love shack of my own, lucky to have these streets to call mine, and lucky to have protection from these streets. I live in a lil’ 1920’s Tudor cottage on the old east side of Dallas, and I really appreciate my neighborhood. There is a genuine cultural mix in ‘hood that you don’t often in the still segregated South. The contradictions keep it real.
Fine old mansions are crumbling next to butt fugly “modern” apartments from the 60’s. Gentrification creeps in quietly like a stranger, and then seemingly roots itself overnight. One day, a run down building might be razed flat and $400k town homes might sprout from the clots of dirt. The same neighborhood bums will roll shopping carts in front of these new town homes with their tiny, sad trees tied to hopeful sticks. The more things change… cliché cliché cliché.
One of my favorite places is a small neighborhood grocery called Jimmy’s Foods. It is a squat shithole on one of the roughest corners in all of Dallas. You can’t see through the windows for all the signs lettered by hand on butcher paper: “Italian sausage made fresh daily”, “homemade meatballs”, “fresh green beans” (which are actually shriveled and limp, anything but fresh.) There are old metal bells that jangle when you open the door, and a worn laminate floor. The same people have worked here forever. In the back, you might see the tiny 80 year old grandma standing before a huge mountain of seasoned ground meat, pinching and rolling a million meat balls. The butcher wears a stained white apron and a bored look.
As an old-fashioned Italian grocery with a combination of basic staples and intriguing imported yummies, Jimmy’s serves both the neighborhood homeless and the neighborhood epicureans. You might see an elite business man in a silk tie and expensive shoes ordering imported cheeses you have never heard of, standing next to a derelict who will eat his weenies in the alley. While the forsaken and the fickle dig thru a shopping cart of clearance wines, one of the ladies-who-lunch might set the alarm for her Mercedes and rush in for stuffed fancy olives for her dinner party at one of the graceful old estates down the street.
At Jimmy’s Foods, you might also see a fat oldskewl bull dagga in a backwards leather cap, with a blond ponytail made ruly by a half dozen rubberbands spaced down the length of it, swinging a ridiculously long chrome chain attached to a biker’s wallet. That familiar Butch dyke from the East side just might be at Jimmy’s ordering a dayum good Cuban sammich with extra pepper relish. Yeah, that would be me, and the black Ford pickup outside would be mine. I too am full of contradictions. At different periods in my life, I have been the hobo and the honcho, and I feel at home here in my ‘hood.
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