Triptych, South Market Street, San Jose
- Peril
It’s a cool, cloudy morning in downtown San Jose, and I’m walking to work, having parked the car in the parking deck. I usually take the bus, but today my connecting bus was late, so I had to improvise and borrow a car. Catastrophic amounts of rain from a winter storm coming in from the Pacific are predicted over the next 48 hours; everyone is on edge.
Cognitive neurobiologists, like Michael Gazzinaga, have suggested that our brains imagine peril, milliseconds ahead of reality, as a form of threat avoidance and risk mitigation. Is that a snake or a stick ahead of you on the trail? By the time you figure it out, it might be too late, so better to think of it as a snake and side-step it.
We fabricate our fear, in order to live another day.
A kid, who looks to be homeless by his clothing, rides up behind me on a bicycle, halting in the middle of the sidewalk right in front of me. My threat brain shouts “beware,” but he does not intend any malice. As I pass by, I notice a full loaf of wheat bread in store packaging on the ground beneath the pedals of his bike. Did he drop the loaf of bread accidentally, or did he just discover it on the ground, hovering over it to claim it?
2. Deluge
Two beat cops are sitting at a table outside the coffee place known as Voltaire’s, probably on break, working a seven to seven shift. I nod to them and imagine they are wondering if the rain moving in soon will be as dire as predicted by the meteoroligists with their sophisticated instruments and models.
If the flooding is indeed biblical, it will mean lots of overtime.
3. Reversal
The neighborhood around the San Jose convention center is a mixture of two worlds: the gentrified world of artisanal coffee shop, Portuguese restaurant (Michelin star), pocket park and a textile museum, adjacent to the more traditional street dross of dive bar, barber shop, beauty salon, clothing alterations and construction company offices.
These blocks are basically safe and clean, thanks to urban renewal dollars. People live here in brightly colored apartment developments, whose names sound presidential and posh (The Taft, The Pierce, The Ryden).
Does the woman walking her dog along the sidewalk toward me fear me, if only momentarily?
Am I the homeless kid on the bike, in her mind?
Could it be that I am the one who’s intruding on this streetscape, solitary, shirt untucked, limping, ahead of the first touch of raindrops?
Photo: Parque De Los Pobladores
