a streetwalker

posted by Hatty

One day in April of last year, when I first moved out of Berkeley, I sat by Peet’s Coffee on Lakeshore Avenue after the spring rain came. I journaled about how much it mattered to care for places you live in. It mattered to get to know the neighbors and to bake cookies for their children. It mattered to walk around your house and apartment once in awhile. I believed – still do – that it mattered to acquaint yourself with your barista, your hair dresser, your pizza delivery person.

The thought had mainly been shaped by a combination of college experiences: Ethnic Studies classes on white flight, a paper on gentrification, an environmental justice survey course, some urban transportation lectures. Also a dose of “socially conscious Christian” values on community, both physical and spiritual.

Since then, I had judged that we as a culture love to live where the streets are nice and pretty shops open up, where the people who walk around look like us or at least like the ones on TV. It’s a story of consumption; that’s exactly why suburbs have come about. We don’t care to be tangled in other people’s businesses or see what goes on in their front porches. We don’t care to let the ugly things get closer to our lives than we feel comfortable with. We don’t want to be messy.

The more we see the more we love.

Byzantine-Latino Quarter, Los Angeles. I’m walking along these twenty or so blocks back home in Koreatown. I see broken glasses on side walks, tortillaria and carniceria and pupuseria open their doors. Small women with kids walk, and men push ice cream carts. I stop by a curious looking used/vintage furniture store – I’ve probably driven passed by it hundreds of times but have never even thought of visiting until today. Three seconds into glancing through the door, and can I say how much more I love this neighborhood? Then I start wondering, who will teach our children to do the same? This seeing? This looking? This passing acknowledgment of each other’s humanity – you exist, I too. We are walking passed each other today. We are alive? Who will teach us to have compassion?

Little Tokyo. Mid-Wilshire. Boyle Heights. The many faces of this city of angels I’ve grown up with. I wish I knew the histories, the things we desperately need to know but rarely get the chance to hear about. Like stories of immigrant Salvadoreans and Koreans and Mexicans and blacks and Greeks sitting together to talk about what binds us together, if not in destiny then in geography. Stories from these places in which we work, play, and live. Stories about this church on my left, built in the Mission style back when who knows how far, now serving one congregation in Spanish, one in English, one in Greek. I wonder, where do those tongues overlap as they sing the same name of Our Lady of Guadalupe?

I wonder if I have a place in that story. I don’t want to be a stranger in my own hometown. This is what I will remember as the reason why being messy and involved is better staying in the cleaner bubble of streets cutting our limbs apart. Cold. Unreachable. Separate. I want the kids scrapping dirt on the sidewalk of West Pico Boulevard running around in my living room someday. I want their parents to know that I will live here as long as they come share the holiday dinners and summer parties with my family. I want the whole neighborhood to help celebrate and grieve and live life in our dysfunctional, loud, and risky ways, in wholeness and raw moments with me.

The more we see the more we love. I pray every step I take, all the way back home.