Under The Surface

I don’t even come close to suggesting I know my neighborhood or that I’m somehow deeply connected to it. I love where I live, but I’m too new here to catch some of the more sinister subtleties. Right now there’s what I see and am shown when I walk around my streets, and there’s a whole helluva lot that doesn’t fall onto my rader. But occasionally there are the little glimpses of some of the mysteries that go on beneath the scruffed up surface.

There is a missing man being sought via a flyer found on Bellevue garage door:

And from a power pole on Sunset someone seeks justice for an  unsolved murder.

And between those two calls for help, in the dark graying of the morning, I watch a young boy in full exuberant run scamper up Lucile only to stop suddenly and consider a yellow gang tag on a gate that had been more recently crossed out and retagged with something unreadable in green. The boy then laughs in a loud and decidedly knowing and perhaps even a sinister way before running onward up the street.

To me it’s just ugly grafitti, to him it’s the news of the day published in a language I don’t understand.