tales from the city
Every spring, I watch the nest that rests on the ledge of one of the townhouses across the courtyard. Each year, at least for a decade or so, the birds return. I am a bad avian identifier from this distance. It's a mid-size gray/black bird of indeterminate species Last spring, they were displaced by pigeons, who I don't think actually hatched anything, but did succeed in smashing down the nest until it was barely anything with their fat little bodies. They would sit on the roof of the building, and too large to share the nest, would watch from the eaves. Sometimes there were three of them, which caused me to start calling them the kinky poly pigeons. By summer, they were gone, probably back to the group I always see over near the catholic school a block away. Once the tree grows in, later than all the others each year, I can't really see the ledge.
The people who live in that apartment with the ledge may be dead by now. An old polish couple who I watched for 20 odd years come and go, already pretty elderly when I moved in. Their plants, which live in their living room down on the ground floor, are kept watered and thriving by someone, but their windows have been dark upstairs. I have probably not seen either of them in over a year, but did listen one morning last summer as an ambulance collected the man. The woman, I last saw 2-3 years ago, stumbling up the steps with a police officer's help. I thought of my mother's late sudden madness or suspected maybe the woman had dementia or wandered away and/or caused a ruckus somewhere. There's a walker that has been parked at the bottom of the steps, and each summer the past couple of years, the plants of the little patch of garden twine themselves around it unmoved. For months, everywhere but the living room and the plants was dark. More recently, there was a light on the second floor for awhile that was always on in another room. Now, the past few weeks, only darkness upstairs. The plants continue to thrive, but everything else looks untouched.
There were times when the messiness of that front room convinced me they were kind of hoarders, and more than once, I spotted them going through the dumpsters in the alley as if hunting for treasures. Their bedroom had an unusually large number of floor lamps in one location. For years, there was a stray cat that the woman would call out nightly for. I would catch one or the other of them looking out the bedroom window toward the street or spot them through the open curtains in their old people bedtime routines, sometimes in pajamas or underwear. I would also seem them strolling side by side on the street, slower and slower as the years passed.
The city, is of course, a strange place. I only officially met my across the hall neighbor last summer when we wound up in the elevator together, after living across from each other for two decades. I know one other denizen of the building from a higher floor. The rest are mostly a slew of ever- changing Loyola students or super-introverts. I did know sorta know the girls who used to live on the other side of my kitchen--well I knew their cat, who would regularly escape and leave them calling after it. One day, I stepped out my door and there she was, curious at my door about my cats no doubt, before she was quickly scooped up by a blonde girl in her pajamas. The cat's name was Amy. I never knew the girl's. Now the boys there shout at sportsball games and someone occasionally plays guitar. I often wonder if they can hear the rattle of my printer through the wall in the middle of the night or my renditions of Taylor Swift as I work...
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