Dérive II

This one came about more naturally.

Rachel and I have begun running together, usually on the Cottonwood or the Rail Trail. This Thursday, we were interested in a shorter workout, and we did not want to drive to a trail, so we ran from our doorstep to wherever our legs carried us in 20 minutes time. She ran ahead of me (I am still very slow) and I kept a pace that turned out to be good for looking at things.

And I saw so much– patterns: lines and symbols painted on parking lots, pairs of windows in rows like eyes in an audience. More rows of things: mail trucks and marquis. Old things, discarded things, decaying things: a tattered hose, sinewy fibers agitated into exposure, strewn in an empty lot across the street from the fire department; a fat tabby cat, been dead some time on the curb, worms crawling in the blackest holes. It was all suddenly beautiful in the ever-dimming evening light, and this place began to make some sense to me and I felt confident that there is beauty everywhere, and one needs only to uncover it, or rather to let it reveal itself to them. And I felt confident that I could do such a thing– uncover it– having been patient enough to allow revelation.

When I arrived home, I decided to walk the path I had just run with my camera and record. I will not include all the pictures here– they are doubtless finding their way into a larger work which I hope will keep me busy for quite a while– but I will include one, the only one that comes from my camera phone:

On the left is Charlie and on the right is Sonny.

I met them on this dérive, sitting outside on Charlie’s lawn, sipping what I assumed was not just fluorescent soda out of mason jars (Charlie’s was a fizzy yellow and Sonny’s a fizzy orange). They were relaxing, having fun with one another. Charlie was a colonel at some point; he fought in the Vietnam War and the Korean War. Besides that, he has lived in Spartanburg all his life. He is in his 70s, but has no use for retirement. He drives a schoolbus now, and the neighborhood children call his name when they pass on their bikes, or from the rolled down backseat windows of their parent’s cars. He doesn’t cuss ‘cuz he’s a Christian, but he jokes to me that he’s been looking for someone to cuss his friend Sonny out.

And Sonny laughs. Much younger than Charlie, he was, until recently “the only black land surveyor in Spartanburg” and chuckles a little about what he should do to his newfound competition.

They wanted me to take pictures of them, so I did, in Charlie’s lawn next to the things he works on to keep himself busy– an old painted tire hung off of a tree, now a home for a vine plant, an anti-squirrel sign, a landscaped pond. Sonny asks questions about what I am doing here in Spartanburg.  And I tell them all about it, and they seem to understand.  They both want to guess my cultural heritage: Sonny guesses Italian, Charlie guesses Armenian.

And they say to me, “We’re just good friends…very good friends,” as if they had wanted to say so to each other for quite awhile, but never got the chance, or the moment never presented itself. They say it looking at no one in the eye, as if there may have been some reason, at some point, to doubt the validity of their relationship, but now there was none, and they were acknowledging its importance for the first time.

Charlie shows me the chimney sweeps and the chimney “over yonder,” where “millions” of them fly into every evening. He tells me I should come take a picture of that, and I say I just might.

I shake their hands and they ask me to paint one of these pictures of them, and I say that I think I will. It is the least I can do for good friends.