The Mayor of Albion

Because it's the first really lovely night in...so long my feeble memory can't even recall the last one and watching an Olympic Opening Ceremony is just about the last thing I would do for pleasure, I took a stroll round the hood. I hadn't been west of Clark in a while, so I buzzed spookyfruit manor and went west until I hit the Metra tracks, where I turned south. At the corner of Ravenswood and Albion I came across a playlot I didn't recall being there before. Of course, I'd only ever been by the corner speeding away down in a darkened alley in his_regard's car so I'm pretty sure I would've missed a life-size statue of Gordon Brown sculpted from gummibears at that corner. The equipment could've been new, but not the site.

At the foot of the railroad easement opposite Albion there were a few new flower beds with wooden sides. A middle-aged man with a grey moustache and a protuberant belly was mucking about in one of them. I was in the midst of checking him out when he spotted me and said, "It'll look better than weeds!" I came over and made polite chitchat about his planting choices. "All things which don't need too much attention." Not surprising, since there's no tap nearby, so the water to keep them alive has to be hauled over in ten-gallon jugs--from his house, which is at the other end of a fairly long block. His florid face was streaming with sweat, so he took a break and sat down on the edge of one of the planters.

Turns out he's a retired school principle whose last assignment was in Englewood on the South Side (one of the highest-crime neighbourhoods in the city). I think he must've been a good one; his manner was sunny and genial and he spoke in a pleasant soft voice. I wondered if he might be gay, but if he was, he didn't drop a single clue. After a while I asked a leading question about "his favourite pub in the neighbourhood" and got an unrevealingly cagey answer. He gave me some good-natured ribbing about being an interloper from "east of Clark".

But perhaps the most positive aspect of the whole encountre was not hearing anything from him I would classify as even coded racism. I could feel myself tensing up when the topic turned to neighbourhood security, bracing for some insinuation which never came. (For that I had to turn to some long-bearded tire-sandal-soled hippy dude who sidled over to talk to us and later volunteered that with Hispanics, "Fifty percent of them are alright, but the other fifty percent...") He's very active in both CAPS and his local church, and seems to take the missions of each of them pretty seriously.

He let me know about an upcoming garden walk on his street (the reason he was out there past dark on a Friday trying to get everything in the ground) sponsored by a neighbourhood gardening association I didn't know existed. Maybe check that out sometime. More likely, I'll just stroll by again in a week or two and see how everything is coming along. He had an exquisitely Irish name which I'll Gaelicise here as Páid Cionaoith, because I'm sure to forget it otherwise. We shook hands and I headed home while he went about getting "two more bags in" before calling it a day. Instead of continuing down Ravenswood a bit further as I'd planned, I turned down Albion instead and tried to guess which of the houses there belonged to its mayor.