In the streets

"I think I could have done more for peace if I'd written about the war, but I happen to love being in the streets."
--Grace Paley.

Early this morning I was moved to hunger for a sepia picture by this one by Chaiselongue. It isn't sepia, but it reminded me of what I love about sepia: the memories, the stability, what remains. Old pictures in an attic, a shoe box, a chest of drawers. A fire escape, a summer's day, light and shadow, city sounds.

It is 1956. I am 11, a sixth-grader at P.S. 156 in Queens. I do not belong. I am an outsider, a shikse, a transplant from the exotic South. I never belonged in the South either, was an outcast there; but on a city fire escape I am invisible, silent, watching. I keep a diary in which I record the conversations of the people who belong. The Sidikmans, the Schwartzes, the Fleishmans. They sit on their front stoops in the cooling dusk of summer afternoons. They know when to beat the carpets, when to light the candles, when to wash the car, when to take the winter things out of moth balls. I yearn for this certainty. I still do.