You are Lovely

By George Pence–

A few years ago, I lived in an older middle class neighborhood in Salt Lake City. The modest homes there were built during the first half of the last century, and though there are variations, the prevailing style is brick bungalow.

“Liberty Heights” came into being before the advent of air conditioning, so virtually every home is dominated by a large front porch. The parkways, separating sidewalks from streets, are punctuated by trees billowing over front yards and filling them with with pools of shade. Back when Liberty Heights was originally established, life on summer evenings centered on those huge shaded porches, and from the throne of a porch swing mothers and fathers would survey children as they played in the gloaming. Waffle balls and hoppy taws suffered no competition from electronic gadgets.

Today these neighborhoods maintain much of their original charm; a charm perhaps even magnified by the way time, in concert with diligence and care, enhances things that are antiquated.

However, what is now lost is the outdoor theater of domestic American life. Walk down a sidewalk in the early evening hours and the streets are empty, the yards vacant and the porches deserted. All is quiet and pleasant, but the transcendent theme is one of absence. You hear your every footstep, and blocks can pass without the opportunity to say anything to anyone. What passes for human connection is the occasional sighting of a flat screened TV through an undraped window.

On a walk like this a sense of disconnection can set in that verges on alienation. Yes, this is a neighborhood with families, but these families are all out of sight, compartmentalized, distinct and disassociated. Even within the houses themselves you wonder at lives lived out tethered to Facebook and those other disassociated people euphemistically called “friends.”

Suddenly a sprinkler system comes on and you’re reminded that even the ancient liturgy of lawn care, once celebrated by homeowners blessing their grass with a hose, is now the responsibility of an electrical control box.

It was on one Summer evening, thinking thoughts just like these, that I came upon a small rectangular section of sidewalk with a legend printed in chalk. It read in a color somewhere between pink and aqua, “you are LOVELY,” and yes, LOVELY was both capitalized and underlined.

It was a wonderfully dissonant sentiment in the midst of all this absence and silence.

It was as if the author anticipated what might be going through the head of a pedestrian he or she would never meet – a pedestrian, looking down, and walking past this very spot. They understood that sense of detachment, and they knew the one sentiment which perfectly contradicts isolation.

Here was a reminder, a sweet note of affirmation with meaning that can only exist when offered by one person to another. “Whoever you are, and even though I’m not here to say it, please know that you are lovely.”

It was a grace note that has endured in my memory far longer than chalk can last on concrete.