Monday, 06 May 2002 | Raleigh

Lately I've been looking around myself, eyeing my location and trying to define it. I'm not looking for my GPS coordinates, or even my place on a political map, though that has always fascinated me. I'm looking at houses, old ones. The one Richard works in was built in 1909, just down the street from mine, and I believe mine must be from the same era, though it isn't as good. I've been looking at how these buildings connect to each other, by grass and gravel and pavement, by slopes in the earth and by other buildings, in an arrangement that becomes familiar and expected.

Yesterday, while riding my bike to the fairgrounds, I noticed a house I'd never seen before, wedged between a gas station and a fast food restaurant on a road I've driven down a thousand times. I like that about walking and biking, that I'm moving just slowly enough to catch the details I miss in a car. I imagine that even if I'd never noticed that house and it was suddenly torn down, I'd suspect something, that there'd be a scratch in that glazed-over familiarity and my eyes would skip over that spot like a needle on an old record.

So I've been paying attention to the flat, spaced-out buildings, the ones that have driven us to travel to Europe and marvel at elegant, confined architecture. Scrutinizing the gas stations, the fire escapes, the dusty, failed small businesses. I'm not being critical of it, just observing it, as I do the people who move through it. Sometimes I wonder what it's like to be one of those people and what it's like to live here. Of course I should know, but I don't feel like I do at all. When people ask me to describe the city I currently live in, I feel unqualified. Perhaps it'll be easier once I distance myself from it.