Familiar / Unfamiliar

Birmingham, AL

2—9

There are only 3 things I remember about Birmingham when I was young.

1 — The civic center coliseum where I saw my first concert and the Barnum and Bailey circus

2 — The steel mills that were rapidly being mothballed

3 — Running my first and last 10k road race named after the sculpture of the god of forge and fire

Surprisingly all three things still exist, in different states of preservation or decay.

Birmingham was the ‘city’ when I was a kid. It was the only urban I knew directly. We would go for culture and for more specialized medical care than we could get locally. It had 2-story malls and buildings taller than 4 stories. It had parallel and indoor parking. It felt like leaving the South when we visited.

3—9

4—9

5—9

**Midwest of the South (2018)**
Mark Sanders

6—9

— A steel mill idly oxidizes.

— A train rolls through downtown decelerating to an unexplained stop.

— Kudzu reclaims a hillside after a winter hibernation.

— Koi swim in an urban park (this is something new).

I had a feeling I have seen all this before. In Birmingham, but also in lots of other places—vignettes from urban areas in different parts of the country. The flatness of the valley that Birmingham sits in took me to the Midwest.

This uncanniness would return in other places I revisited in the South, but those places felt more like a mutated memory, not of being transported somewhere completely different.

Birmingham is different now. Birmingham remains an oasis.

7—9

8—9

9—9

Middle of the night, in an AirBNB perched on a hillside below the 180 foot tall iron sculpture of Vulcan. We’re staying in the Steel City Flats which is both aptly and erroneously named.

In darkness I here four rapid pops, and then four more. It must be the ice maker. But it sounded a lot like…

We wake. We drink coffee. We share how we slept. Strange thing: we both heard the sounds and it really did sound a lot like… We joked that we would know we were right about what we heard if we saw “crime scene” tape.

We shower. We pack. We walk down of flight of stairs to the parking lot and there it is—a crime scene investigation van, but no tape. Neighbors are talking with the driver of the van about what they heard. It would be impossible to see anything from the Steel City Flats since the back wall is completely windowless.

We felt satisfaction in being right and drove away, probably never to stay there again.

And in that moment, my Baltimore present paired with my childhood past.