On the Avenues

It's early in the morning here, pitch-black with just a whisper of indigo at the eastern horizon. There's frost on the grass. I'm cozied up to the computer in my bathrobe with my hot tea at my elbow. What better time for a gratuitous meditation.

I have been thinking recently about a remarkable peculiarity of my apartment's location. In the days of Jack London, or perhaps before his time, Oakland was platted with a row of numbered avenues that run approximately north-south. They extend from Lake Merritt, marching more or less eastward across the city, across the Oakland border into San Leandro, and beyond, for a distance of easily 20 miles. They number up to at least 150. It did not strike me until after I had lived here for a very long time that I live at the terminus of First Avenue.

I live right at the origin of a network that people navigate and journey by every day. The avenues orient travelers, relative to starting points and destinations, and, yes, relative to that origin the city planners set at the southeast lake shore and did not think about again. You give someone directions by telling them, "My favorite butcher shop is at the intersection of 25th Avenue and East 15th Street," and they know exactly what you mean and if they don't, they can look at a map and your location will become clear. Driving along the freeway, I see reminders of my home at the source of the immense grid: "98th Avenue Exit...Oakland Coliseum," "150th Avenue Exit...San Mateo Bridge."

The city planners did not create a turnabout at this hub of the Avenues where my building sits, or a fussy little city park with a plaque. The buildings near me are not numbered 1, 2, 3. Mine is just a bustling, workaday intersection with Lakeshore Avenue.

There are people of various political stripes who mistrust "the system," who insist that anything laid down as custom or institution by these amorphous guardians of the status quo, is to be examined for what it hides or distorts. The fact that there is nothing ever made of the beginning of First Avenue, then, lends it the seditious romanticism of the forgotten.

I live right at a beating heart nobody talks about. The end of First Avenue suggests the axis of reality, maybe a quick, maybe a tender, secret place, like an oozing welt, or maybe a nexus of transformative power.