A temporary job brought me downtown for the first time in two years. Although I worked south of Underground Atlanta in the governmental district, where I rarely had traveled in my 26-year working life, I attached memories to almost every place I passed. Each moment presented a Proustian overlay of people I once knew, worked with, encountered briefly. An Italian restuarant on Pryor Street, where once I'd had lunch with my sportswriting "pod" and our editor, Janel, back in the days when the newspaper was flush and allowed lavish team-building lunches. Underground, where I'd gone with my mother from out of town when it had just re-opened. Where once the sports department had a new year's lunch at a place that had disappeared. And on and on.
I was surprised at the vibrant life of the area. With the Fulton county courthouse, Fulton County governmental building (although its land area it governs rapidly shrinks due to city consolidations), Atlanta City government, Atlanta public schools building, and state capitol and office buildings, the area has a strong base of daily workers to support restaurants, cleaners, and other businesses. Along with the steady rush of middle-aged lawyers trudging to work in their baggy suits, clutching brief cases, in the warm June morning, there were attractive and stylish black women, attractive and stylish white women wearing shoes with impossibly high heels, street people and hustlers, messengers, preachers, young hipsters in sunglasses. Along with this stream of humanity rushing off to business or crime or whatever, homeless folks lined up at Immaculate Conception, or slept in the shade of ancient trees. The steady stream of black people made me imagine myself transported into a Third World capital, Lagos or Narobi. But white men in seersucker and straw hats pinpointed my location as Atlanta.
On my last day, a Friday, I slipped away at noon for Mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Atlanta's oldest church. An old priest whose grave was discovered late in the 20th century persuaded Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman not to burn the church when he was ordering his men to torch the rest of the old Confederate city. Then, which I believe enabled the discovery of the old Irish priest's grave, the church was heavily damaged by fire. The church's structure remained, and the Catholic bishop, Thomas Donnellan, decided to rebuild the landmark.
I arrived early, walking up the steps and opening the door and sitting alone in a pew. I'd drifted away from the church and hadn't received communion in years. I looked around the church's small gift shop, dipped my fingers in holy water and made a sign of the cross, and sat down. A bald man in a suit carrying his straw hat in his right hand came in and sat at the front. Soon, others drifted in from outside. Unlike in the old priest's day, the interior was chilly from the church's air conditioner. I looked at the church's beautiful glass and wood. Rising my eyes above, I saw frescoes of saints, headed to the back of the church. Then I remembered I'd once come to a funeral here for a colleague. There were other memories of the old church. Twice, I'd volunteered to serve food to homeless men at the church's basement shelter. At the second of these, I'd met a memorable man whom I'd featured in a poem I'd rewritten countless times. I was paired as a volunteer with a young black woman colleague with dreadlocks. The man, tall and thin, somewhat resembling Kobe Bryant, I recall, came to the shelter wearing an elegant gray three-piece suit. When all of the other men took to their mattresses lined along the basement shelter's walls, he and the dreadlocked woman and I watched shows on a small black and white television. He took the remote, and switched the channel every five seconds, so that the shows blended into one long TV collage. As he frenetically switched the channels, he talked about his experiences in Vietnam, how once the alarm had gone off in their camp, and they had opened fire, thinking the V.C. was attacking, but discovered the next morning a dead mountain ape. Or perhaps a panther or a some other big animal. This killing stuck in my mind as more symbolic of the American experience in Vietnam than the death of a Vietnamese soldier or a battle. I thought of the desecration of the environment, the ruining of nature with Agent Orange. His elegance (I called him the Duke, for Duke Ellington, in my poem), his stories, his bad times, the promise of Sherman and the Union victory and its recurring failure for people like him who had served their country, all of this swirled in my poem, but never coalesced to my satisfaction.
At last, the man had been told by some supervisor that he had to go to bed, and the woman in dreadlocks and I had two sit up for a couple of hours more, until 2 or 3 a.m., before going to sleep. Someone began pounding on the huge iron door, and although we had been told repeatedly and forcefully not to open the door under any circumstances, she persuaded me to open it, and some street person came in a stole a big can of peanut butter and rushed back into the night. At last, we went to sleep in adjacent beds by the grave of the old priest. The next morning, Thanksgiving, we rose early, and I emerged into bright sunshine and walked past gathering marathon runners to MARTA to catch a train and head home.
As these memories raced through my mind that Friday, a friendly priest came out and began doing the Mass. I waited for the reading, from Matthew, about cutting off your hand or plucking out your eye if they lead you into sin, and then, before the Eucharist, started feeling spooky, with the impression of ghosts swirling around, and hurried outside into the bright day. After a hectic afternoon of work, I trudged back to MARTA, headed through Underground to Five Points Station. At the Peachtree entrace, people hurried to and fro, shouted, walked with lovers and friends.
I decided to get off at Peachtree Center and visit the downtown library, where I used to go almost every morning before going to work. But, after riding what used to be billed as the longest escalator in the world to the top, I discovered the library had closed for the day. I went back to the escalator, and as I took the top step to ride down, a man rushed by me. Holding on to the rail, I watched as he skipped down to the bottom. Such life, such virtuosity! I watched his rapid, virtuouso two-step, and wished I could do the same. But as I watched him reach the bottom and rush across the station lobby to the gates, the dead and the ghosts, and the residue from all of the moments of my life that had passed away, kept their heavy weight upon me, and I looked down at the empty space he had left behind and slowly descended.
