Night Hawks by Charles Johnson

Author:Charles Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Welcome to Wedgwood

A new Rasmussen Reports survey finds that 69 percent of Americans think their fellow countrymen are becoming more rude and less civilized. Men are much more likely than women to have confronted someone over their rude behavior, though more women than men think sales and service personnel are more rude than they were a decade ago. Adults over age fifty are more likely than their younger counterparts to think it is rude for someone sitting next to them in public to talk on their cell phone.

—Associated Press news item

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange I am ungrateful to those teachers.

—Kahlil Gibran

The trouble started on a late afternoon in September. It was around six P.M., and I was sitting under one of the trees in my backyard, watching a brace of pigeons splash wildly around in our stone birdbath, beneath which a stone head of the Buddha rose up from the grass. My dog, Nova, a West Highland white terrier, rested peacefully nearby. I’ve always loved this hour of the day, when the spill of late afternoon light, so ethereal, filtered through old-growth trees in Wedgwood, a neighborhood of gentle hills and slopes at the edge of strip malls, burger joints, auto dealers, and Rick’s topless nightclub in Lake City. But here you never felt you were in a big city—with all those big city problems—because before the Second World War this area used to be an orchard filled with more apple, pear, and plum trees than people, and all that lush plumage absorbed the whoosh of traffic on Lake City Way. Here, traffic moved along at thirty miles per hour. Years ago, it was outside the city limits, and so mailboxes were not attached to our houses but instead were on the street, which had no sidewalks. It’s been called a “Prunes and Raisins” neighborhood, but don’t ask me why. All I know is that the spirit of place in Wedgwood (this area is named after the English china), where I’ve lived for half my life, was that of a quiet, hidden oasis within Seattle, inhabited mainly by older, retired people like myself who all owned dogs, and quite a few college professors since it was only two miles from the University of Washington. A wonderful place, if you enjoyed walking. But here and there things had begun to change. Younger people were moving in, and some years ago the police raided a home that someone had turned into a meth lab. Yet and still, such violence in Wedgwood was rare.

So that afternoon, I sat in a lazy Lotus posture under an evergreen tree, the forefingers on each hand tipped against my thumbs, thinking about images from a new poem, “The Ear Is an Organ Made for Love,” I’d received via email from my friend Ethelbert Miller, while behind me, floating on an almost hymnal silence, a few soothing notes sounded from the wood chimes hanging from my house, accompanied by bird flutter and the rustle of leaves at about ten decibels.

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