Of Development and Exhausted Passions

“A sip of wine, a cigarette,

And then it’s time to go.

I tidied up the kitchenette;

I tuned the old banjo.

I’m wanted at the traffic-jam.

They’re saving me a seat.”                                                  - Leonard Cohen

“Ahhh, God's balls! The Horrible Halt!" Adoulla pronounced the Dhamsawaati term for the complete standstill of traffic with a familiar disgust.”                                                                - Saladin Ahmen, Throne of the Crescent Moon

My place is a place of disappointment sometimes. There is a road, an inland road named for a seaside place - the reason having to do with engineering, plots, and plats. When we first came to this place is was a main road in the same vein as many Main Roads in small towns. It was the longest and the widest, but it had traffic lights only at each end and the volume of traffic on it was no more than on a back-town residential street in a larger city. 

In our first summer here, a man appeared at my door. He was short and swarthy, his hair heavily oiled. On this hot and humid day he wore a suit that was far too warm for the weather and fit him poorly. His tie was askew and he carried a clip-board. 

“They are going to build an over-pass”, he blurted when I opened the door to him, “We must stop them”. 

He went on, as sweat trickled down his face and his feet swelled in his shoes, about how it would change things, change everything. About how the traffic would increase, how people would lose their homes, how it would be an evil thing. You didn’t need to know the facts to know the passion. I signed his petition.

And the next year, the same oily-haired man again appeared in what looked to be the same over-warm suit,  his sweat-moistened petition in hand; and again exhort and plead. He needn’t have tried so hard. I signed the petition - I would have signed it anyway.

My neighbours chuckled and shook their wise heads and told me how the threat of the over-pass had been there for over thirty years. That realtors never even mentioned it anymore to potential buyers - it was never going to happen. That the man was a yearly community joke.

But the little man was fervent and vehement. He was a man of foreign origins and at times his intensity was so extreme that the words of his own language would tangle with the words of his learned language and would create a paroxysm of sounds. You didn’t need to know the words to know the passion. I signed his petition.

Year after year, I signed his petition - for many years.

And then one year, houses were torn down on either side of the seaside place-named street. A concrete armature reached over the expanse of the railway yard that had formally been the division of north from south. It was an overpass, and its architecture rose high into the air and changed the skyline. It’s footings reached deep into residential streets and changed the flow and curve and the meandering dispositions of streets. The soft asphalt that had kept the imprints of dog’s feet or fallen leaves in its soft, impressionable tar was changed to concrete - grey, unending concrete. There are many traffic lights along the road now. There is traffic of brobdingnagian proportions. 

And I remembered he had said, “It will change things, change everything”.

The little oil-haired man doesn’t come anymore. His breathless and avid speeches have been replaced with the constant shushing of constant traffic. His passion is spent and his cause was for naught. I fear he may have died of a broken heart, or at the very least lives lonely with the company of being right. 

In any case, I miss him.