The Brooklyn Rail

A young boy reaches his face around the stroller in which he sits and gazes at me blankly as I pull out my notebook. The wind threatens to turn its pages. His mother coos as he sucks his thumb: What do you think? What do you say? I write this paragraph on the street. I have come out here to watch and feel I am among the delinquents, defying the grammar of the street because I am watching instead of passing it by. I am not going anywhere, and, really, the street is for getting somewhere. Instead, I watch as it carries on in its dance, the endless choreography of the non-event, which seems to be everything: a continuously transfiguring rhythm of happening and detail. As usual, the man across the street comes out for his 5 o’clock cigarette, leaning between the parked cars that drift from curb to curb each day of the week. Another elderly man passes, nearly waddling side to side with a bag of groceries hanging from either hand. Now a young woman appears from the building across the street. She’s taking her boxes out, scaling down the stairs as if it is a treacherous ravine, her eyes peering out from behind the wavering tower. A poster taped to the lamppost solicits donations for a cat’s jaw surgery, and a boy, running excitedly, measures the span of his leash like a kite flitting in the sky anchored by his mother’s hand. Everyone is still learning how to walk, I think, as the belt of a woman’s trench teases in the wind and I overhear parents’ eager teachings as they walk their kids from school: and that’s how you learn to have a job. Now the doorman from the corner building passes and I wonder how it is we’ve switched places: how it is he who goes by and I who stand guard, watching as the street, this rhythm of accident, morphs with the kind of intelligence of water that adapts to the interruptions-instructions of its course. As I watch, I’m reminded of a night a few weeks ago when I had emerged from my apartment building onto the stoop in an anxious fog and, three steps from the top, nearly slipped. In that moment of being neither here nor there, watching myself in the suspension between falling and not falling, it was as if the stakes of reality and the immediacy of its material were repopulated. The sudden realization of the fragility of the very “ground I walk on” clarified something inexorable: I do not want to fall. It was a kind of graceful reminder, even if born from clumsiness. Now the M7 bus heaves its ballooning body down the avenue, leaving in its wake the ad on its back: “Accident?” It reads. I’d been thinking about the signs for accident lawyers that line the subway, the interstate. “Injured? Something wrong?” A mistake, an error, a slip of the tongue. It seems protecting against accident is a way of trying to control time, and to sit on the outside of it—or to pretend to be sitting on the outside of it—is something lewd, in a way, as if one should not look at time, the street, just as one is told not to look at the sun, or other’s bodies in public for fear of being blinded. I search slips, trips, and falls on the internet—it’s such a sing-song phrase, I think, as if a lullaby were forming in the crevices of its rhyme—and when I click on the page for the national safety association, I am surprised to read that falls are “one hundred percent” preventable. What willful resistance to one’s grace, I think, which is the possibility of accident and the wonder that we are not always falling over.