Vox Populi:

Just clear of the underbrush I walk the street’s edge up Dewey, an Old Frenchtown morning and ninety-five degrees, rusty metal roofs, a rare two-story, vinyl siding and the original owner engraved on a plaque, a man on a bicycle, toothless, a shoeless woman in an overgrown yard, a pickup on flat tires — the driver’s door on top of the engine …  the Fourth Street Market, meat cases and canned juice, bagged ice and grey fruit, twenty for a baseball cap, twenty more for a case of Coke.

The Frenchtown in my city — we never walked there as kids, and they never came around our streets either. But some things have changed.

I jog shirtless round the lagoon, hot sun on my pale skin, a great egret with fanned wings on the fountain in the center, wind-rippled water to the left, pigeons and crows, geese and laughing gulls settled in the shade or foraging together, trash and pond scum to the right, and from every bench men wave “hello,” shade trees over-hanging. So many offer a kind word, a sharing hand, but each must repeat himself so my kind may hear.

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