Everyday, as part of my job, I have to make a deposit at the bank. I walk from Lowell Street down to Hanover, duly give money to Amoskeag, and then walk back. Because I usually go around lunchtime, I begin to know the prandial routines of strangers: the same workers head for the hot-dog carts in front of Hampshire Plaza, the same entrepreneurs head for the Atrium, the same secretaries head for Friendly's.
But there's a substratum of people along this promenade between Lowell and Hanover who are not part of the well-dressed, middle- to lower-managerial cadre going out for lunch. They are just as regular as the rest of us, just as routinized about their time and place, but they're usually not very noticed, or, if they are, are usually dismissed quickly by the eye. Some of them are teenagers near the arcade, what we used to call "outies" in high school: longish hair, Ozzy Osborne tee-shirts, cigarettes, make- up that's too heavy. Some are elderly women, who all seem to have enormous purses and who pass from shop to shop making visits and sometimes purchases. There are elderly men as well, but they are usually more sedentary, small pods of them circling a suite of benches under a tree, always talking. There are the street cleaners with their trashcans on wheels and dust pans with flipper mouths picking up the debris of everyone's passing.
And then there are the people who baffle me because I can't imagine what their lives are like. They inhabit nearly the same places every day, often along the ledge and bus stop outside the bank. Though they're frowzily dressed for the most part, rough- edged, they're not what most of us would think of as "street people." (Those are just waking up in the park near the library.) If there are classes of street people, they are a rung or two above where the ladder rests, not homeless, not destitute, marginal but not completely dissolved.
Certain boosters yearn for Manchester to become the northern anchor of the eastern seaboard banking industry. But the people who line my walk are a pulse of city life not included in the official tempo of revitalization. Yet they're important, not just because they're human beings, but because they prompt us to remember what we shouldn't forget to feel. They're hanging on in a city trying hard to change itself away from them, struggling to maintain balance in the pitch and yaw of development. They warn us away from the seductive unvital efficiency that a city eager to be gentrified can come to, away from an architecture and mind set feudal in design and purpose. Manchester shouldn't put too fine a face on itself too quickly, lest it erase character lines worth watching, wrinkles full of reminder and premise.
Friendleaving
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