The street that time forgot

The dog shits more than he eats, I mean volume-wise, which is a puzzlement to me. I like all my bio/medical questions to be answered by Dr. Fauci these days, and while this one might be out of his particular area of specialty and off the subject at hand, I think I’ll send it in to the next town hall on CNN and see what he makes of it.

In the near term, the dog needs a walk, and this day the walk takes us up 18^th Avenue in the Lesser Capitol Neighborhood to find the square-angle connector street that makes a little pocket territory frozen in history.

The Street That Time Forgot is accessed by turning southward off 18th onto a lane the sign says is Adams Street and then a quick westerly turn onto 19th which dumps you out on Franklin, or by turning eastways off Franklin which after a northish turn onto Adams dumps you out on 18th.

You walk by derelict rentals with frayed curtains next to hippie-turning-solid-citizen houses that call up California post-war architecture circa 1949, which always looks better in the sun of a Walter Mosley novel than here, where the desiccated trees seem destined to be snubbed by spring.

This day, when it’s raining and far from Los Angeles and everything feels like a movie we’re watching but we’re in it, too, when humans cross the street to avoid us and if you asked they’d say it’s so our dogs don’t get all pissy with each other but it’s really so they don’t breathe our air and we theirs, where the roadways of this movie are nearly devoid of cars and we make that turn, the left onto Adams, and we’re walking down the middle of The Street That Time Forgot.

It wasn’t Time that abandoned us here in apocalyptic 2020, but somehow we the people went missing in the early narrative of this war on humankind that maybe, I don’t know, could have been managed better.

Some among us are out there working every day trying to figure this out. They didn’t get sent home to be safe, like you and I, and if they weren’t exactly assigned to be heroes, they didn’t back off the job, either.

We were damn lucky to win World War II, no thanks to me, and we won that war because not all the heroes were on the battlefields.

That was some while back, and there are fewer of us who’ve heard about it and fewer yet who were there. Those heroes are dead and dying, and Time stalks past and leaves them.

But listen carefully, and you’ll hear spring budding in those forlorn trees on The Street That Time Forgot. And the heroes, they’re here, right now in America, you jerk, no thanks to you … you who should be listening to Doc Fauci, like I plan to.