My Fresno Was Gone

As the taxi came past the second-hand shop in the house at corner of Echo and Olive, I looked out the window and saw much activity in the shop, which was apparently open. There several people in the in the fenced yard, and some folks standing in the window of Rick's music shop.

It was a Friday afternoon---Good Friday, to be exact, and I gambled on having the cab drop me here in the Tower District,  instead of taking me all the way to my motel. I had figured Rick would almost certainly have students here at this hour of the week, taking guitar lessons.

I paid the driver and huffed my backpack cheerily a half-block towards the shop. For a moment, the Tower District felt fresh and alive, and the sheen of day-to-day manifest nastiness could be ignored.

With a bounce in my step, I turned turned from the sidewalk, into the little walk, went walked past the lemonade stand, which hadn't moved, and up the steps under the surfboard hanging above the porch.

On the porch right away I noticed something amiss. In the window of Rick's store I saw not his familiar cozy little pawn-shop-esque guitar store shrine, but bare empty walls, and much junk and boxes on the floor. The folks in the room were not recognizable. They were apparently customers of the boutique, which had taken over the entire house again, and opened the door between Rick's old shop and the rest of the house.

The items that had been moved into the room were not organized, but mostly in boxes haphazardly.

I recognized the boutique owner. I asked her about the guitar shop that used to be there.

"They moved out," she said, while navigating through a small maze of her own items. Without my asking, she added she didn't know anything about where they had gone to.

Once back on the sidewalk, I noticed that the chalkboard signs out in the yard of the house said "Last Day!" While I stood there on the sidewalk, a large moving van, bearing the logo of a local donation thrift store, pulled up and parked in front of the house. The sign for the massage therapist was still the same location near the driveway.

Unable to make sense of it, I went across the street to the Peach Pit, an old hamburger dive, to grab cheeseburger and leave a phone message for Rick. He immediately texted back and said it was a long story. He'd catch me up on it when he saw me. As I ate my cheeseburger, I watched across the street, the guys in the thrift store moving van begin to take some items onto their truck.

When I finished, I put the little plastic basket back onto the top of the trash container by the door, I went back onto to the sidewalks of the Tower District, and walked all the way down Olive past the theater, and the Chicken Pie Shop, all the to way to Blackstone, where I caught a local bus.

Beautiful Fresno.