A lack of bigots

"White America is in decline.  Never having considered the unearned privilege of being white and American, all they can see are things being taken away from them.  Never having considered solidarity with blacks and Latinos, they see them not as potential allies but as perpetual enemies."

This is a quote from the Dec. 19-Jan. 1 issue of the Economist (a double issue I recommend).  It appears in an article titled "A Ponzi Scheme that Works."  The quote itself is on page 44, first column, attributed to "left wing British journalist" Gary Younge.

It's this quote that got me to thinking about Dorchester's racial divide.  I am the target demographic Mr. Younge is describing, but I don't recognize myself in his description.  I don't see it in my daily travels around Dorchester either, despite the cultural and economic boundaries that separate the sub-neighborhoods.  Everyone recognizes that the different sections of Dorchester are different, but I don't see these as being particularly racially based as much as income-based.  I don't see a lot of enmity either. Dorchester is not a hotbed of revolution and it isn't red in tooth and claw.  Most people are just exchanging pleasantries and gossip from where I sit.

This may be for one of two reasons.  Firstly, I am a white man in a suit, and I am well aware I am accorded courtesies that other people are not.  They are unnecessary and usually embarrassing.  Secondly, I spend most of my time around Columbia/Savin Hill. The races are used to mixing there and not just a simple black/white mix; most available genetic and cultural shades are stirred around in an amicable slurry.  I am also located in a neighborhood full of students who may be lending their open ideas of meritocracy to the woof and weave of social life.

Be all these things as they may, I do get out and about farther beyond and I don't witness a lot of animosity between any parties.  I certainly can't say that I have never seen my fellow Americans as anything but perpetual enemies.  I don't even see them as potential allies.  As Americans, we are all natural allies.  What's better than being an American?  Being an American in Dorchester, Mass.  I think we can both agree to shake on that.

I think this British rabble rouser is talking through his hat, and The Economist article supports my viewpoint with statistics rather than my personal impressions.  When I read the paragraph that introduces this essay, it doesn't match my lived experience.

This isn't to say it doesn't happen.  I just just can't attest to to it.

Mr. Younge's opinion must have come from somewhere.  As a journalist, he cannot conjure stories out of thin air.   If Dorchester is a community of relatively peaceful race relations, I am sure there are pockets of racial discord in other parts of America.  The question is: why not here?

The answer, I think, is that all the bigots have moved out of Dorchester.  It's no secret that Dorchester's population today, like most other Boston neighborhoods, is less than it was 50 years ago.  The people who didn't like city living, with its close quarters shared with different types of fellow citizens, moved away.  The people who live in Dorchester now are either those tolerant Dorchesterites who valued pride in place over homogeneity, their children, or those who moved her by choice knowing what they were getting into.

Where did the malcontents go?

If Dorchester lacks bigots, and they can be of any color, I pity the communities in which they went to roost. They must not be pleasant places.

She inspected restrooms for a living

It's been a long time since any parent was pleased by the prospect that their child decided to become a professional poet. Among the arts, this is the most cash-poor of professions, with low entry barriers and paltry rewards beyond the boasting rights of being published. I think the last poet to actually make a living from this craft was Rod McKuen, so that shows the depths to which poetry's respect has sunk. If you aren't familiar with Mr. McKuen's work, spare yourself the trouble of looking it up. Write a poem yourself instead.

I usually get lumped in with the poets wherever I land rather than with the more important kinds of writers. I'm no journalist no matter how hard I try to report the facts as I find them. Though I do write essays, I craft them with a turgid, alliterative prose fond of lists, a-la Walt Whitman, and dense with hermetic allusions. Too clever by half, I allow my free associations to guide my plot, such as it is, and even I never know where we will end up by paragraph's end. This is my style, for good or ill, and I enjoy it. What this gives to the reader, I have little idea but I haven't received many complaints beyond a recurrent observation that I sometimes resemble a donkey's back side. Be that as it may. In the right light, though I may not be the man some girls think of as handsome, being WK has its advantages.

I was once acquainted with a poet who, like most, couldn't make a living writing poetry. Her day job was travelling from town to town as a public rest room inspector. She would rate the general conditions and cleanliness of public toilets. As far as I know she never visited Boston. Who knows how many pages of demerits she could have written here? The funny thing is, she would boast about her paying profession. For her, it was a badge of authenticity. She could spin poesy as ethereal as gossamer, one syllable hinged to the next in a Jacob's Ladder that, when read aloud with halting...emphatic pauses, would allow the listener entrance to a world of spirit past the grime of day-to-day existence. Her passion was poetry, something which no one cared about. Her work was inspecting toilets, something that everyone does though few of us are paid for passing judgement.

She considered herself a poet of the highest order. The more she was acknowledged as a poetess, the more haughtily she would proclaim, "I'm a restroom inspector by day!" She wasn't a pretty woman. She looked like what you would expect a restroom inspector to look like, no insult intended to those who practice this trade. She would bring her infant daughter with her, one of her criteria being, "Would I change a baby's diaper in this stall?" She would brag that she brought her daughter to highway rest areas all over the Northeast. This isn't the kind of childhood I would wish on anyone but it may explain a social misfit's most deeply seated motivations. The poet in question didn't come from a long line of restroom inspectors. She seemed to have landed into it by chance and, having found something she was good at, she stuck to it. Like her poetry.

What does this have to do with Dorchester? A frequent critique is that I praise Dorchester much as this poet crowed about her career. I have landed in a place that isn't quite where anyone would want to spend their days and, to compensate, the Dot Matrix is dedicated to spinning gold and self-esteem out of manure. This isn't exactly true and I will tell you why.

Dorchester is not a pit stop where people answer the call of nature and don't care what they leave behind. Dorchester is a place where families are raised and futures find their foundations. It is a place that people move to by choice because it is the best option available, not because it is the only option available. Decisions aren't reached randomly in Dorchester, they are by design. After Dorchesterites make their move by conscious choice, they start to build on the community's strengths to enrich themselves and their surroundings. Though fertile ground, Dorchester is not where people flush their deposits. It is a place where they deposit their wages into bank accounts and all their actions accrue accumlated interest.

When I publicly state my affection for my surroundings, it isn't because I am trying make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I am genuinely glad and grateful to live in the biggest and most diverse part of Boston that coincidentally happens to be the best. I am not masking shame with false pride. Dorchester is a place with a deficit of hubris. I report events as I find them, pressed through my patented Whalehead filter which many have tried to copy or mock with only partial success. Dorchester is good and there is no changing that bedrock fact. If you don't believe what you read on these pages, this says more about you than it does about Dorchester. I am happy and I know many other people who are equally happy and they wouldn't trade Dorchester for any other locale in the world. Dot pride is more than a state of mind. It is a way of life.

Happy people

Happy people make life nicer, even on a gloomy day, even in a neighborhood that doesn't have a reputation for generating good news. Happy people have a secret they are willing to share: when you smile, the world smiles with you.

The Ryan Playground on Dot Ave was a happy place this afternoon. Some neighborhood teens, pleased to escape from school due to the local holiday, had wheeled a portable basketball hoop to the park and they were playing a few sets of pick-up. It was all good sport and clean fun, no machismo or braggadocio, no foul language and plenty of fair play. The wind off Dorchester Bay rippled their tee shirts with hints of last month's abominable weather while they worked themselves into a sweat, passing and feinting, guarding and dribbling.

Over on the swing set, tots tried to touch the clouds with the bottoms of their tennies. The slide was well polished by tiny backsides. Mothers and nannies knit on the benches while their charges squealed between the fences that separate the Ryan Playground's oasis from the busy streets that surround it.

Retired bricklayer "Pudgy" Murphy won a large scratch-off prize while sitting at the bar at Tom English's Tavern. He bought a round for the house. He said, "There's no point in having wealth if you can't spread it around." He was smiling when he said it. Everyone else was too.

Almost Heaven

Almost Heaven...Dorchester, Mass...Blue Hill distant...Neponset Riiiiver. Life is old here...1630...younger than the puddingstone...Blowing like the breeze...Oh Dot Ave take me home...To the place where I belong...Codman Square...Hard working mothers...Oh Dot Ave...Take me home...

John Denver didn't pen these lines; I stole his idea and framework. A heartfelt paean to West Virginia can apply equally well to wherever you live if you change some words. Its all in the first two words that start this essay, courtesy of Mr. Denver. "Country Roads" can be tailored to the people of East Boston or Jamaica Plain or Charlestown or Hyde Park or wherever. If you live in a place you should love it.

If you live in a place you don't love you are an inhabitant, not a citizen. You aren't a neighbor, you are a face passing through, taking up space and adding little, paying rent to your landlord but not giving to the community. You don't enjoy your neighborhood and your indifference shows. Why live here? You spend your time elsewhere and aside from your rent checks, you spend your money elsewhere.

Dorchester may not be glamorous but it has its action. There are things to do and many hands make light work. Dorchester is in flux, the way any living neighborhood should be. It isn't a museum. It is a vibrant community. For the people who chose to make a life here, it is almost Heaven.

Dot labyrinth

Wandering in Dorchester, it is easy to get lost. There is little rhyme or reason to the street plan. There's no grid. Dot Ave runs straight as a rifle shot but every other road is either crooked or leading to unexpected destinations. You cannot intuit where you are headed, you can only hope for the best, following your nose and enjoying the journey.

There is plenty to enjoy. I was on Taft Street today, in a canyon sided by three deckers, each as different as they were the same. There were no trees, just porches stacked on top of porches next to each other in a crowded line on both sides of the pavement. I wandered a tableau of antiquated, human-scale architecture and the smells out of kitchen windows drove home the fact that this is a place where people live their lives and eat their daily dumplings.

Weaving and cutting along the twisted lanes that separate Blue Hill Avenue and Columbia Road, I was in a reverie. So much accumulated experience, all of it hard earned and hard won, settled in a part of the city few outsiders visit. I took a loop through Four Corners and got stuck in traffic on Bowdoin Street. The sidewalks were a hive and a haven abuzz with gossip and little routines, hale greetings, nursed grudges and satisfied smirks. Tourists don't visit these parts, only residents, only citizens, Bostonians, Dorchesterites all.

N'orchester, S'ochester... upper, lower, east and west...the shore and the inland cityscape... vistas stretch far in some neighborhoods and vistas are cut short in others... As much as there is blight there is so much more that is set rightly and true. A square can have any shape in Dorchester, wherever two roadways cross or people gather. This is a part of Boston in which you can lose yourself and come out with more than you brought in.

Peacock sighting

A peacock, of all things, is reported to have wandered into the Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot where Columbia Road meets Massachusetts Avenue in Edward Everett Square just south of Dorchester’s Upham’s Corner.

It was 9:00PM, dark, when the peacock wandered out between two cars into the ambient glare of the lot’s overhead lights. This being January, it was cold out and the wind off Dorchester Bay lowered the temperature another fifteen degrees when it blew. The weather didn’t stop some people from standing outside. All the inside tables were crowded and there wasn’t a free chair in the restaurant. A knot of young men and women were passing the time to the right of the side door, deciding where to head next, sharing a large cup of popcorn chicken that still steamed hot out of the fry-o-lator.

Jose Gruzman, 24, of Winter Street on Meetinghouse Hill, noticed the peacock first. He ran at the bird and kicked it into the passenger side, front fender of a green Ford Explorer that was parked in the lot. He continued to stomp on the bird, shouting obscenities in Spanish the whole time, while feathers flew in the air. The young women in the group screamed. By the time the peacock was dead, emerald feathers were drifting in every direction, carried by the wind that whipped Edward Everett Square.

Police officers were called because of the commotion. Most of the people inside KFC couldn’t tell what was going on in the parking lot because of the steam on the windows. They knew violence was being committed and they sounded the alarm via cell phone.

By the time the police arrived, Mr. Gruzman and his companions were sitting at the bar at Yaz’s Place up the street. The police took pictures of the dead peacock and Public Works was contacted to bag the remains for disposal. No tickets or citations were issued, and no investigation was opened. It isn’t illegal to kill a peacock in Boston.