Hey, wait a minute! Ducks don't wear socks!

One of the things I liked about living in New Orleans, which I did in the previous century, was how improbable the whole place was. Coming from a mid-American suburb where I rarely saw anything out of the ordinary, where people fit easily into a handful of commonly acknowledged categories and conducted their lives within the bounds of well-defined parameters, where the unusual wasn't just scorned but actively repressed - coming, as I say, from a place like this, I was excited and a little bit frightened by the variety of life on display in New Orleans. A homeless man grinning and jamming to a boombox like he was the happiest man on earth, a randy group of St Ann Street queens purring and catcalling at me and my friends on Halloween, a bearded man wearing an Uncle Sam hat riding an enormous bicycle down St. Charles in the middle of a weekday, serious as church - things like this were entirely new to me, and they helped me to realize that life could be a lot bigger than I'd always assumed. It's funny now, after more than a decade of living all sorts of places and seeing all sorts of things, to remember just how wide-eyed I was back then. And how perceptive: I vividly remember, as a freshman in college, attributing all the improbable things I saw in New Orleans to the improbability of the city itself. There should never have been a city built there in the middle of a swamp like that, I reasoned, and so the people there were living with a sort of subconcious understanding that they were living on borrowed time, that the sea and swamp could at any time decide to reclaim what was rightfully theirs, and you'd better try to live life a little before it all comes crashing down. That may or may not have been true, but subsequent events have at least shown how precarious - if not exactly improbable - life there could really be.

Since I left New Orleans I've lived in quite a few places where the unusual happens more or less frequently. Boston wasn't a great place for the unusual, although Somerville had its moments. In Dublin and Belfast I had to pick my jaw off the ground several times - the time I watched two young men, one African and one Indian, standing on the Lisburn Rd in Belfast watching an Orange Order parade, decked out in Kick-the-Pope Protestant regalia, exchanging thumbs-ups with perplexed and inebriated Orangemen comes to mind - although much of the craziness I encountered in these cities was undoubtedly due to the quantity of drink consumed by the people I was observing (and by myself). During my too-brief stay in Philadelphia I often found myself stopping and smiling at something crazy or pleasant or fascinating going on out on the streets or in a park - when, that is, I wasn't dodging drunken brawlers at Dirty Frank's or having long, intense conversations with strangers who looked like Adam Duritz - and I'm pretty sure that, given enough time, Philly would have helped me recapture a bit of my youthful fascination with the odd and the improbable.

But all the same, I'm finding that as I get older I'm getting harder to impress. Things that 18-year-old me would have seen as evidence of life's rich possibilities now often seem fatuous and contrived, tired variations on a theme I've heard too many times. NoHo has got me thinking this way lately. It's the sort of place where being Subversive and Different are highly valued activities among many of the inhabitants - where the mainstream is something to be scoffed at and dismissed with almost the same vigor that the unusual is scorned by the the folks back home. My heart, as always, is with the subversives, but now it does so with a sort of resigned and weary shake of the head (I know hearts don't have heads - just bear with me) instead of the "golly gee whizz" amazement of my youth.

Example 1: Last night, while walking down Main Street with my father and brother, we passed the usual group of hippies clustered around the entrance to the Haymarket Cafe. A small boy of about 2 was playing with something and the hippies were cooing over him. On closer inspection I saw a large black duck wearing socks - the pet duck, as it turned out, of the woman who appeared to be the boy's mother (they were her socks the duck was wearing). The little boy was thrilled to pieces with the duck, but I don't think I even cracked a smile.

Example 2: Also while walking through town with my family the other day, we saw a man ride past on some sort of vehicle made out of what appeared to be several bicycles, some multicolored plastic plates, and an umbrella. He had a twirling beanie on his head and some sort of music playing. I don't remember the rest because I didn't really bother to turn my head to look at him.

These are two examples from the past few days, but things like this happen all the time here. I've already mentioned the singing girls who gave me the heart-shaped cardboard cutout the other day. In a future post I intend to talk about the ninja who inhabits my driveway. Sometimes (as with the singing girls) I'm fairly charmed by this stuff, and sometimes (as with the ninja) I'm annoyed, but more often it just barely registers. All the same, I suspect that I'd miss this sort of thing terribly if I ever moved back to Oklahoma - and would probably be regarded as eccentric myself, if not downright strange, if I failed to shed my crazy big-city ways quickly enough.