Younglove Avenue

It’s only three blocks long, between Mission Street and the circle with the church, hardly an avenue really, but the train tracks slashing through it at an angle give it a greater scope because as you ride across them carefully on your bike so as not to slip you can look both ways and imagine long trips in a boxcar. So maybe the street is bigger than it seems, and when you lived there for a year it certainly was, opening both ways (not to speak of the journeys along those rails) toward unpredictable loves, the ones you knew and the ones you pursued and those who showed up at your door at midnight just to amaze you. The fire station across the street was where you voted, and the kid next door who mowed your meager lawn was paid with your little portable TV because you needed some excuse to give it away, you had no use for the televised lives of stars because your own was already almost too romantic to take, so many ballads going at once you needed a few more bodies to play them all, more guitars, more typewriters, more ballpoint pens, more songs. Fast forward a couple of decades to another house a block or so down on the other side of the street, where in a rented room behind the kitchen you took little naps on break on production night when your newspaper was about to be put to bed. Your paramour’s spare bike was kept with hers in back and after work some summer evenings you’d take them out through the neighborhood whose cooking smelled eternal both for what it suggested about your dinner and for its aromatic echoes, neither here nor there yet all-pervasive, more total recall than you can bear. Younglove Avenue, who gave it that name, as if knowing it would set the stage for such passions, and that so many more years would pass before you’d know how long you could hold what happened there in your heart, something you’ll never understand and are still in search of.