"Lower Walnut, Indeed!" My Downtown
By Don Rothman, Special to Santa Cruz Wire
SANTA CRUZ (October 2009) -- We cross all sorts of thresholds everyday. Awakening from sleep, we cross one. There are the literal ones as we walk from room to room or leave the house. When we get in our car or saunter into a coffee shop, yet others. We notice them especially when something unexpected happens. The word for threshold in Latin is liminal. A modern dictionary tells us the word now means “belonging to the point of conscious awareness below which something cannot be experienced or felt.” I’d like to borrow this evocative word to describe my experience of downtown Santa Cruz, a place that periodically is scorned for its low-life, frightful vulgarity and underworld ambiance. I descend into the downtown just about everyday, and I guess I’ve been fortunate not to have succumbed to oblivion, rage, or numbness. In fact, I love this daily descent, a stark contrast with profound similarities to my 34 year ascent up to the City on a Hill, UCSC.
I don’t claim to know very much about everyone’s downtown, but my downtown is replete with surprisingly meaningful encounters. I call my experience liminal because it is unpredictable, slightly edgy, just on this side of understandable. I have no doubt that others are put off by some of the people I find intriguing. I have no trouble understanding people who want to be comfortable when they come to the movies or those who fear potential violence. In some way, however, generative, sometimes productive, discomfort is what I seek when I come down into town.
I pass through several micro-climates and micro-cultures in the fifteen minutes that it takes to walk from my house to Pacific Avenue. It is a journey marked by passage across busy Mission Street, past august Santa Cruz High School, around the gentle curve of a beautiful limestone retaining wall and elegant steps, across railroad tracks, and alongside a rare bunya-bunya (false monkey puzzle) into a copse of arching sycamore trees before emerging into the Pacific Garden Mall, for some, a den of iniquity and discomfort.
On the way I see etched into a square of sidewalk “Lower Walnut, Indeed!” For years this expression of wry outrage, scratched into the concrete when it was still wet, has confirmed my itinerary into the lower depths. I pass the eternally under-construction Women’s Center, a toy exchange playgroup business, the telephone company building with millions of colored wires on erector set racks visible through its thick windows behind which I hear the muffled sound of NPR, a college of beauty, a yoga center, and a Christian bookstore that used to be a mortuary. These places are alive with workers, mothers, toddlers, lovers, seekers and stretchers. As I walk by, I know where I am by their familiarity, and it is comforting, like a benign habit.
But I am heading for more than the familiar, and that is why I am borrowing the word “liminal.” I am trying to stay alert to the world and not reside solely in my own expectations. I am looking for a place where my openness to something other than myself may lead to an unexpected or overheard conversation. That is downtown. I am experiencing downtown as a threshold into a sort of social interaction that doesn’t always depend on appointments or datebooks, but thrives on unplanned encounters. I am downtown to spend an hour at a coffee shop reading and writing, listening and talking, nurturing some small sense of wonder and gratitude that people need each other in remarkably different and sometimes inexplicable ways.
Almost daily I bump into R., a homeless guy in his seventies, always dressed in black, who lives in a black VW bus, and over the years we exchange some small fragments of our lives. He shows me his drawings and I tell him about what I’m writing or reading. I lend him or give him some money at the end of the month when his welfare check runs out, and he delights me by reciprocating with a set of embellished photographs that I place on a bookshelf in our bedroom. When his letter is published in the Times Literary Supplement, we rejoice for a few minutes.
Recently I talked to one of our new “Hospitality” workers in her bumblebee colored uniform. She tells me how difficult it can be to deal with passive-aggressive panhandlers whose resistance to authority seems adolescent. While we talk, tourists ask her if there’s a bead store in town, and she lights up, eager to help them. Moments later a small group of Israelis ask where there’s a taqueria, and she offers them maps and concise restaurant reviews with graceful generosity. Being helpful buoys her spirits, and these visitors are absolutely charmed by her attention and amazed that this is her job.
My experience of downtown is liminal, because when I walk from my house, I am entering a space that is neither personal nor public, but both. My walk takes me through a landscape of my mind as well as my physical neighborhood. I both belong and don’t belong, each day finding some new purchase on an identity that resists simplification. Sure, a cup of coffee is still just a cup of coffee, but those around me are my community, and I want to more fully realize what it means that we occupy this place on earth together, even as I anticipate my uphill walk home, preparing to recount what I learned.
Don Rothman has lived in Santa Cruz since 1973, when he began a long career as a writing instructor and founding director of the Central California Writing Project at UCSC. He is now vice president of the Shakespeare Santa Cruz board.
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