Riding in Durham

Headed out on a ride yesterday, a little after noon. It was a mild day, otherwise that last sentence would have been crazy. I was headed north, towards Hillsborough, but am a little tired of those routes already, so as I started along Erwin Road I thought: "why not head to Durham and tool around?" I had made this ride last year while the protests following the killing of George Floyd were ongoing. America was still quasi shut down, though opening back up slowly with masks on. On that day I -- a middle class white guy on a not cheap if not too fancy road bike -- rode past an encampment right in front of the new Durham police HQ on East Main St. It was a hot day. A young woman of color who was camped out there said to me as I passed: "Do you need a water?".

Riding in Durham for me is a constant stream of memories, in a way very different from Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill is baked into my consciousness inch by inch but also day by day, minute by minute, so often I am trying to recall what was once in a given spot because I feel I should command its entirety. It is therefore a space more of forgetting than remembering.

Durham, by contrast, is a place I haven't lived for longer than a summer since I was 5, but I've spent a lot of time there. So places are associated with people and events. I ride across Duke's campus and there's the dorm where Leslie lived her freshman year, there's the one where I did soccer camp and there was no AC and we'd get burgers from McDonald's delivered at the end of the day, after we watched films, because we'd be so hungry from playing games after dinner. There's the dorm where Natalie stayed at TIP, there's the one where Graham did. There's the one where Amy from Dallas -- whom I met at Andover in '82 -- lived her freshman year, where I visited her when she came to Duke later. Did I spend the night???

I rode out through Trinity Park to the School of Science and Math, where Leslie and I were born. I stopped on Main Street at a new patisserie -- Miel Bon Bons -- and had a spinach-artichoke croissant. They didn't take cash so at first I couldn't buy it. I went outside and was putting on my helmet when the young lady working the register came out and said: "I can give it to you for free!" I threw a couple of bucks in the tip jar and sat and ate the thing (quite good) and watched a number of lower income Black people walk by, looking at a boarded up convenience store across the way. It was hard not to be reminded of Eddie Murphy's classic "White Like Me" skit from SNL, but the thing was delicious and the proprietor had shown marketing savvy.

But I digress. The main point is that my memories of Durham aren't laid on quite thick enough for them to obscure one another. There are just enough of them to form a mnemonic layer.