I’ve been working in Newark since late 1989 and for the most part, I commute by car (I take a train or bus every now and then). Most every day I find myself driving across a variety of urban neighborhoods. The suburban streets where I start and end my voyage each day are fairly sedate. Once in a while there’s a police car or some fire trucks to dodge, and the garbage trucks and school buses are always a nuisance. I’ve seen more than one idiot run a stop sign in front of me, in the nicest of towns; luckily I’ve always managed to stop in time. But on most days, the suburban portion of my drive is quite predictable.<\/p>\n
But once I get into the Newark \/ East Orange zone, the situation gets a little more interesting. You have to be ready for things you wouldn’t expect living in the ‘burbs. <\/p>\n
Over the years, I’ve seen cops on foot chasing a suspect running along the road; a guy arc-welding in the street (without shielding, threatening you with drive-by blindness if you look the wrong way); a pickup truck passenger throwing large stones at other cars (luckily he was a block or so in front of me); a pedestrian who walked into the side of my moving car (my luck held once again — I was going slow and he was stoned; I stopped to help him, but he got up and waved me away); various street fights; a train of 6 or 7 cop cars in a high-speed car chase along a narrow back-street (again, I must have a very good guardian angel; the whole procession crossed my route about 2 blocks ahead of me); and various stray dogs, screaming EMS trucks, oblivious pedestrians with negative attitudes about suburbanites using their streets, road-ragers taking umbrage if you respect yellow traffic lights, stop signs and the speed limit (really, the speed limit plus a third; anything less gets them honking, flashing lights and trying to pass and cut you off); and other interesting things. <\/p>\n
My favorite road-rager of late is a cute, dark-skinned young woman with a huge SUV whose vanity plates read MS KIM; when I see Kimbo zooming up on my bumper near Roseville Avenue, I know its best to just pull over and let her go. Have a nice day, Ms. Kim.<\/p>\n
Today, I had another new urban experience, right near the Newark-East Orange border on Springfield Avenue. I’m driving along, and suddenly I see birds in front of me. That’s not unusual, but something was different, these weren’t starlings and pigeons. My luck holds once again as no one is on my own tail (this would have been a bad time for an encounter with my sweet little Kim). So I approach these birds slowly, ready to stop . . . and low and behold, it’s a brood of chickens! There’s a black hen high-stepping along, with quite a group of little cluckers following her across the road. I slow way down as to let the last of the half-grown fryers and broilers of the future get to the proverbial “other side”. <\/p>\n
Why did these chickens cross the road? I’ll leave that as an imponderable Zen koan for now. The Zen masters tell us to “be in the moment”, and if all moments in Newark were like this, well, it wouldn’t be so bad. I know that one day I’ll miss it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been working in Newark since late 1989 and for the most part, I commute by car (I take a train or bus every now and then). Most every day I find myself driving across a variety of urban neighborhoods. The suburban streets where I start and end my voyage each day are fairly sedate. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2898"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2900,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2898\/revisions\/2900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}