*** Sidewalk Weekend! *** #44

Sidewalk Rating: Better than you think

I'd like to welcome you aboard the Northstar line
Relaxing transportation you will find
This service is for you, your friends and your kin
Glad you're aboard, hope you ride it again
City to city, you will see
Gonna get you there very quick and safely
I hope this ride will help brighten your day
Now I'll tell you the stops that are 'long the way
We've got Fridley, Coon Rapids, Anoka, too
Elk River, Big Lake, but we're not through
Gotta go to St. Cloud? There's really no fuss
Hop off at Big Lake, catch the Northstar bus
So park your car, then board the train
Once you ride the Northstar, you'll wanna do it again

-Vincent Roberts

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By the time I read White’s essay “Here Is New York,” I was a city-side reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and beginning to suspect what he meant by the city’s capacity to bestow “queer prizes,” among them “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy” that place the inhabitant in “the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.” The meaning of the remark came clear on a cloudy afternoon in Central Park when I came across two men seated on a bench, each with a fanciful parrot resting on his shoulder, engaged in intense discussion accompanied by decisive gestures and rapid changes of expression. The parrots were identical; the two men were as unlike one another as a ferret and a panda—on the near end of the bench a small and heavily damaged white man in a threadbare raincoat, early seventies, not many teeth, sunken chest, furtive demeanor; at the far end of the bench a handsome and handsomely tailored black man, gold jewelry, stylish hat and brocade vest, broad-gauged grin, majestic presence.

--Lewis Lapham

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