Where We Like to Gather Alone

            My boyfriend replies to the picture message I just texted him, he is amazed at how big City Hall was, alike in so many ways to Buckingham Palace of his own country. He’s growing sentimental on me.

            I take a second look up, and he’s pretty much right.

            The gray steel dome is the crown to the seat of this brave little city. Brave in that it was proud, boasting, loud of its progress and generosity.

            City College, they’re not too generous with. A cluster of pink T-clad protesters hand out signs written I ♥ CITY COLLEGE but no one really approaches them. And they’re keeping to themselves. The only hands reaching out are trees bordering the wide perimeter of the Hall, fists jetting from brown ash trunks like bones, and grasping clumps of thick green leaves. It’s their last hold onto summer.

            I turn and cross the street past white vans and old burgundy and navy Hondas. The fog’s burned out, now the only chill left remains hidden in the air underneath all the blue sky. People are scattered. Taking breaks. The people I cross the street with, the ones in crisp collared pink and purple shirts, they’re office workers. Men and women in pink and purple, standing around and mumbling on their phones or even to the sky, with their cigarette butt dangerously close to their light-colored tops. Walking past me are two pink T-shirt men, smiling as the younger one reasons to his companion, “I mean, if they build it, then they should fund it!” They’re walking away and down prink sandy gravel, a big dirt carpet no one cares to tread on. My feet are the only ones to know the crunching onto the tan rocks. The wind picks up, and I pick up something myself. Sooner after I’ve gotten hold of scattered newspapers the reader briskly comes up to me to redeem his goods. “Thank you, m’am,” he says under the black baseball cap, in a low voice. I walk away smiling, and he barely cocks his head upward to say lastly, “Have a good day, m’am.”

            Other things fly in the wind. Flags above are tethered; nonetheless they sway and dance with the birds. I’ve never seen them before. There’s a Ben Franklin snake on yellow, a dull green tree in another. LIBERTY is printed on one. LIBERTY AND UNION is the craziest in the wind.

            Battered, dull-colored complexities serving as children’s playgrounds mark the north corners of Civic Center. But coming onto a patch of damp grass outside the Western Structure I see the patch is already taken by a sunbather. He doesn’t take too much space. There’s enough between us for me to sit, and for him to be at peace to pant and lick his black-spotted fur.

            Beyond the sheep dog stands a man on the curb facing the majestic Asian Art Museum. Plastic cups of water lay at his feet. Just as he’s scooping handfuls of it into his palms to rub onto his stained bare back, a tour bus comes to a halt. Zebra-reminiscent in the striping on its paint, the tourists grouped inside the open-top vehicle of The Urban Safari. The people in there find it strange. The man’s bathing, thinking of nothing else. Something as bathing on the streets of a city boasting of progress is a blessing for one person who thinks to whip out their iPhone for a picture. Heads are tilted, eyes behind aviators and classic wayfarers narrowing in onto a single being. “It’s a Jungle out There” the zebra carriage reminds us. To the bather, this isn’t a jungle. It’s his life—the hour he can spare for himself in the time of others around him, just to feel presentable.

            A whistle sounds through that corner of the Center. The dog’s still there, smiling more than ever with his head pointed to the sun. Opposite him lies a thin figure, in gray fleece and dirty olive jeans, keeping a simple steady whistle at the creature. He’s flopped onto his belly. “You’re in the sun,” he says twice, in a soft, admiring tone to the dog. His ears pick up at this call, and the man thinks of what else to say: “Here, yeah! Come over you.”

            Nothing.

            Not even the spikes of tan bark the sluggish man flicks in the dog’s direction bulges the thing.

            Something seems to work. The dog sniffs the air for a second, and laps his tongue twice over a black spot above his left hind leg. It’s too late anyhow; the man’s already given up to look in the direction of McAllister behind him. The dog sees a perfect advantage to walk over, close enough by the man to where under a broad bush of purple flowers he scratches and digs at the damp cool dirt for a comfortable bed in solitude to lie in.