Mumbling Madly

This weekend was….exhausting, exciting, frightening, emotional, and all sorts of other crazy words. It started off well, with my parents coming up to check out our brand new digs. Josh and I were tired from a week of a commuting and working, our phone wasn’t working, Josh’s uncle was dying, and our neighborhood seemed unusually active.

On Saturday on our way back from Kubota Gardens, (just a mere two blocks away), some woman yelled from inside her house something to the tune of “you white folks get off my block.” Which almost seems funny when I write it now, but at the time it was shocking and deeply hurtful. OK, so maybe we were gawking a bit at the dilapidated houses on the block, wondering what they might look like if someone who cared took the time to fix them up. Sure, the four of us stuck out in our polar fleece and athletic shoes. But, we’re already pretty sensitive to the fact that we’re a minority in the neighborhood, that our presence is a little awkward. It sucked to have someone justify all our deepest fears, make us feel hideous, like we needed to pack up and leave…that maybe it’s true, we made a terrible mistake in moving here. Speechless, Josh and I went home and tried to make sense of the comment. (My parents were incredibly unfazed). I think it really hit us where it counts; we’re already kinda vulnerable, having just purchased this ridiculously priced property in a neighborhood that doesn’t at all feel like home. Sure, we have the Seattle address but we’ve been battling huge commutes, navigating our way through strange streets, trying to avoid the weird blocks to find a decent trek to the water only to find the entire beach COVERED in goose poop (sorry, Mom and Dad). All these little agitating things building up and BAM, someone yells something incredibly racist and we’re totally undone. Of course, we concluded, we’ll continue to walk up this woman’s goddam block to go to Kubota Gardens…we’re certainly not the only white folks in the neighborhood, much less on ‘her’ block. We’ll resist finding out what house she lives in and pick a fight, defend ourselves, further agitate the situation. Maybe she’s crazy, maybe she’s old and seen too much and the last thing she needs is her block gentrified. Maybe I needed to experience what racism feels like for a day, what people feel in a life time. Either way, it put a damper on our spirits.

Things improved when we went to dinner at St. Clouds. We avoided the interminably ugly Rainier Ave. by going north by way of the gorgeous Lake Washington Blvd. We ooh’ed and aah’ed over the lake view, the huge houses, and I fell silent…longing for the funds to live in such beautiful neighborhoods. To compensate for my lousy mood I ordered the biggest and the best: encrusted prime rib. It’s the dish that Sammy always orders that I can’t afford, and it was truly delicious. We went to Cup Cake Royale and, surprise, they had a ‘happy hour’ going on: 6 cupcakes for 6 dollars. We took advantage and loaded up. We cruised south on Lake Washington Blvd, winding through Mount Baker and then to the bottom of Seward Park. Suddenly we found ourselves pulling over several times to let cop cars whiz by. We crept down Seward Park to where the street intersects with Rainier Ave. The corner was swarming with fire trucks, cop cars, and people standing on the corners with their mouths open. A cop was hurriedly blocking off a large part of the street with yellow police tape. “OH NO,” I said, “Oh my God, what is it? Another shooting? I don’t think I can handle another shooting.” Somewhere in the dark we saw the outline of a horribly mangled car and gleaned that it must be some sort of terrible accident. Our street was blocked off by a cop car, so we had to wind our way up side streets to make it back to our house. When we got out of the car I noticed how dark it was, “Hey, didn’t I leave the porch light on?” The power was out…all up and down our street the houses remained black. I felt incredibly uneasy. We crept inside, lit candles, and I called Kris, hoping he could tell us if there was breaking news. He couldn’t find anything, which made me feel a little better. A big shooting would glean at least a little front page news, right? That’s when we heard the helicopter circling overhead. People were milling about, bored inside their homes without electricity, the huge sounds of fire trucks, sirens, and the helicopter magnifying the situation. My parents actually took a flash light and walked up and down the street, trying to find out who had power and who didn’t. Turns out our entire neighborhood was dark.

Josh called his sister, who looked up the Seattle city electric website and determined that 2500 people were out of power because of an accident involving a car and a utility pole. The details of the crash are so gruesome, I won’t repeat them here. Let’s just say it deeply disturbs me that something so heinous happened so close to where I live. The electricity returned for all but 400 residents–us included–and we spent the evening listening to American Band Stand on public radio while my parents dozed on the couch. Sometime in the middle of the night Josh and I awoke to hear a series of POP POP noises, which I assumed were gunshots but Josh ruled it out as the electricity eeking through broken wires. Our power returned around 3:30am.

The next morning we walked to Safeway with the guise of buying coffee and a paper but also to scope it out. Work crews had been up all night, trying to clean up the broken wires, debris, and glass. Strange piles of rubble littered the street, the pieces appearing to be melted pavement, perhaps the result of the electricity reaching the ground. The trolley lines that propel metro city buses hung low and haphazardly across the road. The sun came out, and lit up the place in an eerie, cheerful, fashion. We walked past a woman and her two dogs working in the yard–Take THAT, another white person!–and we petted her animals and admired her garden.

Inspired by the sun, we sat outside on the porch and tried to feel the normality of the day: