Durham on My Mind

Posted on December 13, 2003 in North Carolina

People got to talking about cities in the South on IRC tonight and my head began to swirl with images of Durham, North Carolina. Chiefly a street with green edges that swerved wildly to the left and shot towards Raleigh. It existed about four blocks from my home.

I drove around Durham some, but until the day I left, there were corners of it that I never explored. Fanning out from this street, for example, were neighborhoods which remain a blank for me. I found places only as I needed them. One of the last locales I discovered was the Western Union office, with a yellow sign out front, a glass store front, and a barred window through which they dispensed cash to me.

I regret never having stopped my car to investigate the cemetery which crossed the street a few blocks from the last place where I lived. Durham had two plans about it: a neat north-south-east-west plat and a few sections — owned by Duke University and other large landowners — where the common sense was cast aside to fill plantation landscaping sensibilities.