sweet t:

Memphis was recently named the third saddest city in the country.  Just after Detroit, and some place in Florida.

I’m not going to lie, as a newcomer, I have noticed some sad things about Memphis.  But there are sad things in other places too—every place probably.  But the endearing (and challenging) thing about Memphis is the way it refuses to hide the poverty, crime, and corruption.  And the hitsory!  So rich, but still tender. And good Lord, what about all those people driving their old model cars ever so s-l-o-w-l-y and without turn signals along Poplar Avenue with its tiny fourth lane!  Now that tiny lane is sad.  Speaking of Poplar, all of Memphis seemed to at Macy’s at Oak Court today, where the music annoyed me coming as it did in the form of different songs (1980s music streaming from accessories, hip hop blaring from juniors), two gigantic waves of sound colliding in my head.  But at least it wasn’t Mariah Carey screeching out Christmas songs, so why the heck was I so grumpy?  Probably because besides the collision of music, it was still shopping, after all.  But mostly it was a party. Workers handed out treats on trays.  But even that I could be grumpy about—imaging how a team of marketers probably recommended the party atmosphere to boost sales and shouldn’t they be ashamed, given how small local incomes—the way those marketers would dare to inflict good music on good people in an effort to sell their Chinese-made tunics and knee-high boots!

But on my way out of the store (grasping a bag containing my own Chinese-made tunic), I nearly fell over a woman and the cleaning cart she’d parked mid-aisle.  Damn, I thought. But then I saw she was leaning on the cart for support because she was that tired and that old, so she’d set her stomach against it as she probably had for years, so that the cart looked like it had become part of the woman. But that was only her mid-section, that meeting of cart and cleaning lady.  The rest of her?  

In flight.  

Arms raised, hands snapping high over her head, eyes closed, legs making smooth circles from the hip…the woman was having herself a little party between racks of tunics and the counters of this season’s shades of eyeshadow.  

It’s true. Sometimes Memphis is sad.  But it is also many other things, including real honesty and soul and pockets of spirit; such things that rarely make it onto polls and city lists.