Riding the train to the city I looked idly, almost blindly at the garbage that had collected at the side of the train track. Now that is something that you normally do not get to read in the tourist guides to New York and its vicinity.
As the train ran into Newark we passed a housing project that in 1972 was still fairly new and reeking of some warped idea about how people want to live. Even at 14 I wondered which architect had considered it likely that people would want to live stacked up by the dozen or that even if they wouldn’t choose to live like that but had no other choice than to accept it that at least this kind of home would allow them to still feel dignified and human.Passing the place by slowly rolling into the Newark I also routinely thought of the kids living there. Even back then I realized that their childhoods were eons away from my own – and yet neither they nor I had done anything to earn or deserve our respective places.
The people living in the project showed their disdain for their environment and the esteem they thought they were shown by that part of society that thought it convenient to stack them so they should not spread out so much by simply tossing out all of their garbage down from their balconies as if they were sailing on some ocean liner and were expecting to be separated from their litter by the sea-miles the boat would eventually put between them and their debris. Maybe they were right. As a matter of fact every couple of months the city of Newark sent up public works people to accomplish some provisionary clean-up. It would take the people living in the place but three days to reclaim the roof of the parking deck for the surreal landscape of garbage that would pile up like a contemporary piece of art. Every time I passed that particular project in the train from Summerville I marveled at the amount and variety of debris that the people had discarded like this. Toilet bowls, umbrellas, junk food containers, baby wipes, plastic bags filled with undisclosed content, baby carriages, lamps, pet cages, sofas, shoes, a broken guitar, a variety of clothing items including baseball caps. One jacket had caught on the fragile branches of a small wild tree that had dug its roots into the concrete and held on for dear life. Passing by that day I very much felt like that tree. The jacket kind of dressed it as a human and made it appear to be a malnourished yet utterly determined person. I liked the tree and hoped nobody would eventually label it as an overgrown weed and pull it out. I don’t even know whether the scrawny thing had any leaves in summer and yet it seemed to me a small encouraging sign that you can never bury the human spirit entirely under a heap of junk. I might have been sentimental but, for heaven’s sake, I was 14 and felt entitled a bit of sentimentality to endure the discovery of a less than perfect world that our parent generation had left us as our inheritance.

My mother was in the kitchen as I had expected. I was a bit weary of talking to her but not much surprised that she was preparing pancakes again, pouring the dough out of the ladle just as I entered the kitchen as if she had been waiting for me to start her act. Again she poured the dough very carefully, so that each cake had exactly the same size. I wondered briefly whether yesterday’s pancakes were still in the fridge. “Hi, honey,” my mother greeted me with a surprisingly warm, unstudied voice. They were getting better at it, I thought, but why always pancakes? Most mothers try for some nutritional diversity let alone my mother who was not all that happy about our enthusiasm for waffles and pancakes which she called “empty carbs”. She normally tried to entice us to start the day with her own frog-slime-green home-made wheat grass juices instead or some unidentified grain and would only occasionally yield to our pleading for sweets for breakfast. I returned her greeting cautiously. “Morning, mom (I had to overcome a bit of reluctance to call the impostor “mom”). Pancakes again?” “But you love pancakes,” the mother impostor answered, very much like she had the day before. Again she also offered me a bowl of fruit salad that I accepted after some hesitation. I did not want to eat anything that had been prepared by a stand-in for my mother but I was ravenously hungry by now. I did not have much money left for my trip to the city and would not last the day without food. Spring grass green, orchid red and a lovely glowing pale orange mixed to an enticing advertisement of a fruit salad but the fruit tasted stale at best. Actually, I reconsidered, it tasted like nothing, not stale, not fresh, not like apple, not like orange, not like grapes. A dreamless nothing of a fruit salad. I finished it off none-the-less, staying hungry and craving more food. The stand-in-mother served the pancakes next, perfect, buttery light brown pancakes with a small lake of amber syrup on the side. I finished those off too, almost curious as to whether they would satisfy my hunger. They did not. The pancakes despite their delicious perfection dipped in dripping syrup were melting in my mouth without leaving the acid sugary taste I was craving. I also noticed that they had no temperature, they were not warm, they were not cold either. At best, they did not exist. After eating three pancakes I had been served I got up from the table just as hungry as before. This time however I walked over to the fruit bowl and took an apple. My mother looked at me dreamingly as if she didn’t know what to do next. The spatula in her right hand was raised as if she wanted to make a point and it remained like that. She was waiting. The program had a glitch. I waited a bit longer just to see how long it would last, it seemed that she was stuck, spatula extended. Finally I took pity on us both. It was almost fun to experiment with this creepy otherworld, but only almost. I had to find some humor in it or else I would have been lost with fright. “Bye now’” I addressed her finally, “got to rush.” “Bye, sweetheart,” she responded automatically, the spatula still raised. I turned away. I hoped she’d be released out of that pose or she’d be sure to have sore muscles later and she needed her arm for painting. I realized how ridiculous that thought was. I needed to stop thinking of her as a faulty program. But it was hard to. At least I felt pity rather than fear. Fear is paralyzing. I walked off towards school then changed direction to the train station.

A parking lot and two blocks worth of retail place ankered around a Barnes and Nobles book store had replaced the industrial clutter of deserted flat brick buildings and weeds she had known like an internal landscape of suburban dread for all of high school. The place now had the mark of a new era of tidy franchised architecture, the clocks had been reset to zero and were running fast. Fifteen years count-down to decay, or to the day the last book would be printed, whichever came first. There was no emotional reaction to the replacement of her childhood environment with these exchangeable elements of retail culture. The fact that it was nearly impossible to tell whether she was in New Jersey or California actually felt kind of welcome, delaying the realization that she had indeed come back. She pulled into the parking lot next to a brand new looking silver Ford SUV with enough space to accommodate a mini baseball league team but most likely outfitted with only two child safety seats and DVD headrest monitors. It was still raining.

The muted green and white neon lights of the book franchise and a coffee store melted in the dark reflection of shallow puddles over new tar with the circus red lights of a franchise family restaurant branch. For a moment she could hear the animals restlessly pacing in their cages, but the impression faded quickly and made space for the mundane evening traffic of the mall. Families kept arriving to spend a Friday evening searching for a way to wile away some hours for the prize of coffee and a magazine. She held a door to a young mother pushing a stroller with a sleeping toddler. More families passed through the parallel doors, and for a moment the circus was back, forever lurking in her mind, waiting for just about any reason to manifest itself. People in anticipation of a spectacle streaming into the big top tent. She let go of the handle and followed a family with two young kids passing through the small foyer and the second set of doors that echoed the first. The father of the family dropped the door on her, she caught it with her shoulder without a moment of surprise. The whole family then stopped right in front of her to perform the incoming routine, willfully ignorant of whoever should be behind them. Kids immediately shedding their coats into their parents’ expecting hands and taking off towards the kids’ book section. Battery powered books, stuffed character animals and a wooden train table all well within kids’ reach had nationwide proven to be wildly popular with the preschool through elementary school set. The mother feebly called out some warnings and then both parents, strangers to each other now that the kids were gone, walked towards the café to satisfy their craving for caffeine and sugar to get them through the evening and were immediately lost in the crowd of customers stopping at sales tables long enough to scan the back of a book cover or to flip through a brightly illustrated volume of some sort.

About.