Painted

“This is the best thing that’s ever happened in this town.”

“No — the best thing that ever happened in this town was a half-naked man in shiny pants getting dropped out of a box. That’s number one on the list; this is number two.”

“This is the second best thing that’s ever happened in this town.”

With mutual nods, our walking troop proceeded South from what we call the Square. Where did this path go from here?

“Straight to the Chattahoochee.”

The present members of the Kiwanis Under-forty Club silently agreed that we’d stop and turn around before getting that far.

A few years ago, back when there was only one coffee shop on the Square, I worked for awhile at that coffee shop.

And the back door of that coffee shop opened up to a courtyard: a space surrounded on four sides by the backs of street-facing shops. The patio was covered in worn-smooth pavers. Iron tables and chairs were scattered under tall, generous trees. The unruly roots of the old trees felt like hands reaching up from under the bricks to hold you close and safe under their shade.

And the patio attracted all the best sorts of people: artists and musicians, chess players and Bible clubs, friends and families and Train Kids and teenagers who would leave their half-drunk Gatorade containers in small towers of prosaic trash, neon altars to their incurable apathy.

One day when I stepped out the back door of the shop — to collect cigarette butts and other offal — I saw something surprising.

Up on the second floor of a white brick building was a strange and wonderful little mural. I guess it was no more than 6 feet tall by 3 feet wide.

It’s hard now to remember exactly what it looked like — it’s been years since it was painted there and almost as long since it was scrubbed from the wall.

When I close my eyes, I can imagine what I think I saw: a sort of blue-grey blob-shaped character… big eyes… some shape… was it yellow? Pink?

Even when I squinch my eyes closed as hard as I can and look into the milky blackness on the backs of my eyelids, it won’t come to me.

I’ve lost it.

All I remember is that it was brilliant and playful and it definitely wasn’t supposed to be there.

The patio looks different now.

The old trees are gone. Replaced by sprightly new specimens “more appropriate for the park, less likely to tear up the plumbing under the shops.”

The old pavers are gone. Replaced by new bricks that are too squared at the corners, making up an undeniably safer but more glaring floor.

A hunky electrical box — a piece of equipment that before the revitalization was decently obscured by shrubs and a garden of pansies — sits awkwardly naked, now, in the middle of Atherton Square. It makes me uncomfortable. Every time I come up on the thing, I feel like I’ve opened an unlocked Porta-John to find somebody’s grandpa with his trousers stuck around his ankle socks. It makes sense that it’s there and it would be polite to pretend like you didn’t see it, but it’s embarrassing just the same.

And, on this day (the second best day in the recent history of the town, as far as we can tell) it seems that every person made a personal decision to pretend like they didn’t see the naked electrical box.

On this day, it was easy to ignore because there was so much more to enjoy.

The Mayor shook hands with Patsy Cline before cutting a ribbon in the park. Dancing nymphs carrying streamers drifted carefully through the maze of people crowded ‘round. A family posed to have their picture taken with a Queen in a frilly getup. And everybody had their dogs.

Little dogs in harnesses; big dogs on long leashes; happy Pitts, teensy Yorkies, and pairs of Greyhounds, all with happy pink tongues out, lapping at the sunshine.

The sheer numbers of these lovable beasts, each looking so well accommodated and content with their owners in tow, is and will forever be in my mind insurmountable proof that the Marietta Square is indeed the most perfect place for someone to bring their pets, and their dogs in particular. In fact, I think we should all like to see a great many more dogs on the Marietta Square tomorrow and every day henceforth.

All the City’s favorite characters came out of hibernation and onto the trail for the promise of art and magic there.

Familiar buildings were re-born as canvases.

The back of the art gallery was dripping with bold blue and magenta shapes, yielding the outlines of sweet birds.

Outside of Dupre’s, children took turns posing against a depiction of a jaunty baby chick, turning their hands up so that the perspective of the photo made it look like they were sure to be squashed underfoot.

“We sponsored the peach!” Our friendly neighbor who runs the market gleamed while a commissioned artist rolled soft, warm paint to finish the belly of a gigantic split stone fruit showing its pit.

We walked, smiling uncontrollably, along the railroad tracks, past evocative sculptures and past rows of mounted photographs hanging along the fence. We walked past the backs of parking lots, marveling at the wildflowers there. We walked over a new bridge until we came up on the Confederate Cemetery.

“Best turn around.”

We walked North along the tracks, past the Episcopal Church’s parking lot where friendly men sitting in lawn chairs waved at us from behind the silhouette of a handsome antique automobile. We walked over a less-new bridge, past the Brumby, down Church Street, and over to Sessions.

On Sessions Street, the Watermelon House hosted a real-life barbershop quartet, whose members taught tags to anyone willing to participate in their front-porch harmonies, while the house’s treasured keeper (here for a spell from her other home out of town) poured cups of sparkling lemonade to anyone who stopped inside to get out of the sun.

At the end of the line, a band played honest songs to a parking lot full of people who ate barbecue with reverence while their children produced impressive plates of slime* using Elmer’s glue**, tempera paint, and glitter from the craft table.

*While judging the local elementary school science fair, I learned that concocting “slime” is a popular activity for young people and that our own budding scientists can be quite experimental when it comes to the ingredients of said slime.

**I recently observed an aisle display comprised solely of gallon jugs of Elmer’s glue, and I’ve since deduced that this display may have been set-up specifically to capitalize on the current interest in aforementioned slime-related activities. One cannot be sure.

At some point, late in the afternoon, we realized we were all hungry and tired from being so happy.

So, we dispersed for dinner, walking back along the sidewalk where thick lines of sidewalk chalk scrawled rainbows and sweet words:

“Peace.”

My parents raised me in this town. Even now, I’m sitting three doors down from the porch where we hung twinkle lights in the rain on my wedding day.

Last weekend my parents moved a plane flight’s distance away. Before they left, we met for coffee and we walked the trail together.

“See, here’s where the kids from the school painted a mural…”

“And, look, back in this alley, there’s some art here, too…”

“Was that door always so blue?”

It’s all different than we remember it.

Clean brick. Lost trees. More people. More dogs.

When we came to the part of the trail with the bucket of sidewalk chalk, my dad took a piece and wrote “T+J” and he drew a heart around the letters.

I don’t know if their heart is still there. How long has it been? Has it rained?

All I know is that lately I’ve been walking around with my eyes wide open, stopping to see and re-see every thing, every brilliant gift that’s here now. Because next time I squinch my eyes closed tight and look as hard as I can, I want to see it all so clearly that I know it’ll never get lost.