More Signs and Wonders

Another day another walk with Dogger. I had a suck day at work, again you say? So soon? Yes.

So I’m being all dejected and looking at the ground, mostly because I have new sneakers and I want them to stay clean –er then my old pair. I see things. Things like a nametag from a Jewish Federation event. In my neighborhood. It was on the curb near the VFW. It’s not a Federation neighborhood. It’s not a YMCA neighborhood either for that matter. It’s a Salvation Army neighborhood. Who, by the way, aren’t here either? The cops offer the only salivation in my neighborhood. They will at least take them off the streets for a night, feed them, medicate them, dress them.

There’s a storefront church every three blocks, still have staggering numbers of battalions of staggering numbers Where are the churches for these people? Who is responsible? Who is supposed to feel responsible? (The city? The State? The Government?) Why are these people wandering the streets, getting into knife fights in the fields, hurting and getting hurt? Shouldn’t the churches be tripping over themselves to Out Christian each other? One is having a Revival this week. I think they need a revival.

As I was reading the handbills and garbage along the way I looked closer at the Latin Princess and Getumout Bail Bonds signs. I think they may be the same business. They share a building with an insurance company with the motto “Tell Your Friends We Care”. Down the street is a no name lawyer’s office. There are a couple of law offices. Neither of them wants to tell you their names – even the nicer looking of the two. That firm uses a house built in 1855. It once belonged to a prosperous shoe salesman. I know this from the historical marker in the pavement.

There are a lot of markers along the way. One marks the location of a long ago “experimental” railroad (it was a railroad only in that it was not a canal, it used horses to pull carts full of marble for the construction of the capital), another the home of a long gone Free Will Baptist church. Another gives the name of the neighborhood as Starving Neck, as named by the freemen who lived there after The War. Another lets us know that the street marks the original eastern boarder of the city, another one about 12 feet down the side walk lets us know where the historical district starts. The historical society used to work very hard. I was reading one of the handful that rated being vertical, they all say Blah, Blah Great Man, Did Great Things 1 quarter mile east” why not put the sign one quarter mile east? One has “125 feet north”.

The DMV building rates two different signs. One proclaiming the site as the location of the first state fair grounds the other reminding us that after it was a fair grounds it was a Confederate Training Ground, then a Union barracks then a Confederate Veterans Home, until 1939. The one closest to my house tells us that until the late 1940s there was a baseball field there. Now there is a shuttered Exxon Station.

While on our walk I passed a house that literally had everything including the kitchen sink out on the front yard. Eight blocks to the East it would be eviction, in its neighborhood it would be restoration. I wondered if all the stuff on the front yard may be for give away. I should have asked.

I also saw a lone plastic baby doll arm. All by itself. It wasn’t there yesterday. Where is the rest of it? why tear off a baby doll arm?

Two signs advertising lost kitties. Lulu has been gone for a while now. Snofurder disappeared over the weekend the sign asked if you heard him crying in a tree or from under a porch to let them know. Tex is going to have to dig his way out, he isn't going anywhere unescorted. Two missing kitties are two many too close to home.