Yesterday morning, like every morning, the kid and I drove the 30 minute route through Baltimore that leads to her new charter school, nestled deep at the city’s center. It’s impossible to cross any broad expanse of Baltimore without hitting areas where the road is strung on either side with boarded-up row houses, block after block (this set on flickr, taken by a local photographer, perfectly captures the strange desolation we see here every day). It’s an urban moonscape, empty and forbidding.
This is Baltimore, cold stone and concrete and immediacy. There is no facade, no face the city presents to the world that conceals its essential truth. For better and for worse, Baltimore is urban living with the mask torn away.
There are miles of these streets in Baltimore. I can’t help but feel a certain amount of sadness, and a touch of uneasiness, as we drive through those eerie, dead zone blocks. I’m not sure what M makes of them. She’s been living here since she could walk, long before she could speak complete sentences. This is the only reality she’s ever known.
There’s a particular section of road we hit every morning near the lush green campus island of Johns Hopkins that is a especially difficult. Five long city blocks. If we hit all the lights green, it’s perhaps a minute’s time, a blip on the radar of the experience of the day. A dispiriting sixty seconds.
Seen from the corners of my eyes as we move past them, those sad, dead row homes with their plywood doors and black, gaping windows look like faces. Faces frozen by fear, or sadness. Or death.
Yesterday we hit a red light. M shouted out to me from the backseat, “Hey look! Free stuffed animals!”
She was looking at one of several street corners we pass in this five block stretch where a light pole has been festooned with balloons and teddy bears and cards, an urban marker memorializing someone’s death.
“No baby, those aren’t free stuffed animals,” I sighed. Then, of course, I had to explain what they actually were, what they actually meant. As I said the words, I felt my throat close, and a fist tightened around my heart.
By the smallest degrees and increments we destroy their innocence. As parents, we have no choice. We can’t lie to them and pretend the world is better, easier than it is. We can’t omit the reality that people kill people every day on these streets, on the streets of every city in every country the world over. We can’t hide the truth that the same humanity that makes Pixar films also makes human beings who murder without flinching, without conscience or remorse. We can’t not answer their questions when they ask them. We have to tell the truth, though it might break our hearts to do it.
It does, it does.
Yesterday, the truth was, and remains: five blocks of desolation, concrete, and death. And I hate that I had to be the one to break it to her.
