Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge

46
eight hours, then I leave.
Every afternoon I disappear into Union Station along
with hundreds of other people. I sit on the train and stare
into a book, more spaces between words. My expression is
fixed. Sometimes I fall asleep and dream. I sit for forty-two
minutes, and get off when my station is called.
I have little to do with the man with the wild hair. So
why do I think about him so much?
Passing of El Pueblo
By 1870, killings and general rowdiness in the place
called Sonoratown caused city growth to shift southward
from the plaza. Don Vicente Lugo, famous for his
horsemanship and ownership of the sprawling Rancho San
Antonio, joined fellow pobladores in the Campo Santa
cemetery at the end of Eternity Street.
They turned from people to streets. Don Francisco
Sepulveda. Augustin Olvera. Julian Chavez. Maria Ygnacia
Alvarado. Jose Vincente Feliz. From living to dead. The
stagecoaches that took passengers from Pico House to
Mission San Gabriel stopped coming. The city grew. Time
went on. People forgot.
There are pictures in history books that show the same
hills that are now covered with houses, the same fields of
waving grass that became freeways. There are plenty of
pictures of the plaza and Pico House and the Avila adobe.
The man with the wild hair is not in any of them.
Gone
The thing I feared most has come to pass. I walk
through the plaza and the man with the wild hair is gone.
Perhaps I have just missed him, I think. But the next
morning he is still gone. His absence is more palpable than
his presence. His hair is wilder, the expression on his face
more intense. He is not sitting in one place on the worn
brick, but everywhere, looking out the window of Pico
House, ringing the bell in the old church. I imagine he's
done it, gone back to become a vaquero, riding a horse the
king brought directly from Spain, sitting on a saddle
dripping in white silver.
I imagine such a thing is possible, in a place ringed
with history, a place where the past and present merge.