An Avenue Sized for Parades

The main avenue is sized for parades and gets, on an ordinary Saturday, me. Eight lanes of intention, flowerbeds trimmed to regulation, the kind of width that only makes sense when you imagine it full of tanks and gymnasts, which, twice a year, it duly is.

I walked the middle distance of it for an hour. Traffic was a rumor. The proportions kept insisting on ceremony and the weekday kept declining, and between those two facts is the whole texture of this place: a stage in constant readiness, mostly empty, never struck.

A woman swept leaves from the pavement with a birch broom, the sound following me for two blocks. Somebody maintains the readiness. That, more than the parades, is the real institution.