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multifamily dwellings, and a few small apartment clusters that housed the area's more transient populations without seeming to change the surprisingly serene atmosphere of the community as a whole.
    I was strolling down one of those streets whose almost unearthly calm seemed a thousand miles from the bustling energy of the commercial strip. Not that there was no activity here. In fact, there seemed to be brothers in motion all over the place. Over there was a man working on his car. Two doors down was another man repairing a screen door. A little farther on, a man was raking leaves in the yard of a brightly painted cottage with a gaggle of pink plastic flamingos stationed along the driveway like sentinels.
    Several of the men inclined their heads slightly to acknowledge my passing by, but otherwise they were all about whatever task lay before them. I realized how good it was to see men around visible and working. And how rare. When I heard the voice of Bob Marley coming from the open windows of a house at the end of the block, it seemed the perfect sound track for the serenity of the street.
“Don't worry about a thing ,
'Cause ev'ry little thing gonna be al-right …”
    I love that song. I played it so many times when I first got out of rehab that it's permanently etched on my brain. I stopped in front of the house where the music was playing and listened to it like they were playing it just for me.
    The building was a four-unit gray stucco with a perfectly manicured lawn and a bright blue front door. The large lot beside it had a sign that identified it as one of the neighborhood's many community gardens and boasted three rows of the prettiest winter collard greens you ever saw. Too bad this building doesn't have a vacancy, I thought. This would be perfect.
    That's when the blue front door opened and a man came out wearing a black cashmere overcoat, a black homburg, and sunglasses. He looked like Michael Corleone in The Godfather when the boy finally embraced his destiny and became a sho'nuff gangster.
    He walked straight over to me, smiled pleasantly, and removed his glasses, rendering me temporarily speechless. “Can I help you?”
    It was his eyes! This brother had the bluest eyes I've ever seen in my life. They were even more shocking—and that's what they were, shocking— because he was so perfectly dark. Africa dark. His skin was the kind of soft, velvety black you don't see over here much anymore now that we're all so mixed up and miscegenated like good citizens of the twenty-first century. As if in defiance of the Middle Passage, and despite the complicated racial mixtures that define the diaspora, this brother's skin was original black .
    Did I say he was also fine as hell? He looked like a painting of an African warrior king on one of those black history calendars, except for those eyes. Not baby blue, or gray-blue, or cornflower blue. His eyes were turquoise like the jewelry they make in the Southwest because that's the color of their sky at sunset. Turquoise like the water around the Caribbean islands where all you want to do is drink rum and make love.
    I knew I was staring, but I couldn't look away. I took a breath and tried to collect myself. I don't rattle easily, but I hadn't expected Aunt Abbie's vision to kick in quite so fast.
    “Do we know each other?” He was still smiling.
    “I … I was just listening to the music,” I finally stuttered. “Bob Marley.”
    “My painter is a big reggae fan,” he said. “I hope it wasn't disturbing you.”
    “Oh, no. Not at all. I'm … I'm a reggae fan, too. Old school.”
    His eyes actually seemed to twinkle at me. “Are you new to the neighborhood?”
    “I wish,” I said, wondering when the big black Lincoln had pulled up soundlessly to the curb behind me. “There don't seem to be many vacancies around here.”
    He looked at me for a long moment, which was fine with me because it gave me an excuse to look back. I wondered if those eyes ran in his