Saturdays in the City

Saturday mornings were special in our South Broadway neighborhood in Little Rock back in the 1970s. The afternoons waited for more anguish in renovating homes, but mornings were a time for a soft, gentle re-entry into life.

Our neo-hippie neighbor across the alley would start things about the time the last family started moving about. Majestic tones of a symphony would drift through the area, something beautiful but largely unknown, like the piece composed by Edward Elgar for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. That’s when you knew he had coffee ground for visitors, deep, dark, rich coffee he ordered specially brewed from a small, obscure, company in Seattle called Starbucks. The thought of it would draw one like a tractor beam.

Weekends were also a prime time for discarding unwanted junk. You just put it in the alley and the city would haul it off come the new week. Unless …

Unless our neighborhood scavengers saw it and deemed someone’s else’s junk could be a treasure to a person possessed of high degree of imagination. Brenda and a resident of the last house to the south were the pilferes très excellent. They would meet in the alley to inspect the discarded items that each had placed in the alley and those of other neighbors as well. Sometimes their chatter mixed in the air with the sounds of Mahler.

“Why, the metal in it alone is worth keeping,” one would say.

“It has to be good for something,” the other would say.

“You want it?”

“Yeah, but you can keep it.”

“You can have the next one.”

They were courteous hoarders, these two. During a recent visit nearly 40 years later, a spouse and I agreed that both families still stored items rescued from destruction in that old alley.

Back to Saturdays, sometimes the lady at 22^nd and Broadway would stroll by in her Sunday best, white gloves and all. In all likelihood, she would hand you a present that she had just prepared that morning. It might be an empty chewing gum package wrapped in yarning twine, a tree’s twig with a ribbon, or something equally imaginative. All her gifts were assembled from items picked up during her morning walks. She’d hand it to you, smile with pride, and move on.

Another alley resident was true free-spirit, a nonconformist who, had she thought in those terms, might have considered herself an early feminist. She’s a grandmother now, and writes editorials for a statewide newspaper in what may be the most conservative state in America, no doubt causing waves that reach tsunami level. Good for her.

A couple from down the street might walk by and nod. I’m not sure what the younger did, but his partner was, for a tragically short period of time, the first openly-gay music director at one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious churches. We never knew where they went after the congregation of Christians voted to terminate him after hearing the news.

At the end of the block, north, was a brick apartment building built behind the house facing Broadway. It was government-subsidized and boasted a diversified group, including a family who spent weekends travelling, with their young children, to far away churches where they spread their form of Christianity. The upper-floor occupants were more transient and sometimes deposited products of their weekend euphoria-spells in the alley. They never bothered anyone, though. “Like Mack and boys,” they tended to their own adventures.

That describes our life pretty well. We had our own little “Cannery Row,” which was nothing more than an obscure alley in a neglected part of town in a City that had been cruelly treated by those who create history. We were simply trying to preserve some of the better remnants of its history.

We’d start back at it just after lunch.

You know there's a dead
rat under the kitchen.
Ain't historic preservation fun?