Loss

Yesterday's rain has passed, and the sky is washed clean. Air smells of damp earth and newness. The clocks are shifted, an hour gained. I enjoy that hour walking about the mostly quiet streets of West Oakland. St. Patrick's has its doors thrown open, and music  spills down the steps, voices singing words I cannot understand. It makes me happy just to hear the song.

And then, I turn the corner and discover a pile of trash dumped on the still blooming garden, the beautiful garden planted in the narrow strip of land between the sidewalk and the street.

Two things make this spillage unusual. First the trash has not been dumped at a corner (the more ordinary place for illegal dumping) and second, the objects dumped are not various. Everything dumped here belongs in the life of a small child. A child-sized mattress, wrapped in plastic, lies in the street. A deflated wading pool, neatly rolled, spills from a plastic bucket. A battery-operated motorcycle, minus its front wheel, is on its side on the dirt.

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face to the ground

And on the other side of the blooming Scotch Broom,  a very clean white teddy bear is face down in the dirt, spilled from a laundry basket that still contains a DVD player and two soggy Disney movie DVDs. I am sobered by this sight, made sad. The dump hints at loss, unspeakable miserable sorrowful.

Who threw away these small pieces of a small life and why? That someone would heave these objects atop of blooming flowers suggests either great anger or great sorrow.

Cover the beauty with great pain.

UPDATE: One hour after taking these pictures, while church members were still inside praying, a 14-year-old was shot maybe twenty feet from the teddy bear with its face to the ground. The block where I walked this morning is now cordoned off with yellow tape, stretching from the chain-link fence outside the school to the wrought iron fence of the church.

OUTLAW HANDGUNS.