“Page!”

I look up at a black man who has appeared from behind his house which is halfway between mine and Pinewood Elementary on the corner. He shakes his head as if he has had about all of me he can tolerate. I think I know why.

“Woogie! Come on, damn it!” I yell. Like a marble statue, my dog is frozen in the classic posture of an animal doing his business in a neighbor’s yard. Emerging at the east end of this castrated mixture of beagle and melting pot is a soft quarter pounder that would make a St.

Bernard bark with pride.

“We were trying to make the schoolyard,” I explain. As persistent violators of the leash law at all times, Woogie and I escape detection at this time of day only in the dead of winter. On this gloriously mild mid-October afternoon at six o’clock in the evening there is still plenty of light.

“Over the years your dog has dumped enough fertilizer in my yard,” my neighbor says mildly, “to start a nursery.

Actually, I was about to call you.”

“I’m sorry,” I lie, racking my brain for his name. If my memory is like this at forty-eight, I can’t wait for fifty.

Connery? No, Cunningham. Rosa, my late wife, would have known. A native of South America and dark herself, she knew everybody, black or white, on our street. The longer I live in this neighborhood, the fewer “pleasantries there are to exchange. Crime, drugs, racial tensions in the schools, etc.” were supposed to have been solved by now; instead, the problems are worse. Twenty years later, Blackwell County, located in the center of the state, hosts the “Crips” and the “Bloods” and other gangs, almost all black. On our street, mostly a mixture of white retirees and middle-class blacks, it seems as if all we can safely talk about is the latest addition to our medical records, which, as the years pass, are becoming the size of the Dallas phone book.