It was a walk to see what had changed, to see if I could get a few things I needed. It was a walk to reconnect me with something that I felt I should reconnect with. My feet had pummeled there throughout the 1980s, when I often wore the Presentation College uniform. It was where I went into every business to try to sell advertising for my father’s ‘Trini Trader’ magazine, or to do things for the printery, or to desperately check for the latest computer magazines at Victor Manhin’s, long gone.

It was where I haunted when I ‘broke biche’, playing hookie in my last few years at Presentation College, hiding in an amazingly small coffee shop you would not know was there unless someone told you – to either meet with skirts of both shades of blue, or to read. It was where I hiked down to the old Muscle Connection Gym to work out and to later get my free Tandoori chicken meal at Tara’s Kitchen in Carlton Center. I paid for neither, having bartered for the first and earned the last through friendship.

Of course, most of it was gone, as the old dustbins that used to be were. I hadn’t walked down in that area for close to a decade. I was surprised to find it more clean than it had been, though it was still dirty. Library Corner no longer had the library. A facade in front of the old Library would have made me worry that it would suffer the same problems of the Red House, but on the way I had seen where it was relocated. A mental note to swing in there sometime.

A walk down the street saw me looking for the sports store that was no longer there, saw me heading down to look at shoes to replace the tired old running shoes I had – these were 10 years old, detritus from my last period of life in Trinidad, not looking worn but the bounce of the sole lost in time like the bounce of so many souls. I shopped around, toward the bottom of High Street, seeing all manner of shoes costing thousands of dollars that I would never be seen in public with. Gaudy. Eye catching colors. A culture I shunned in footwear and in most other things, preferring to remain as unnoticed as possible on the streets where I always stood out anyway. “The Professor”, as they called me back then on the Coffee and the Carib, liked to blend in but somehow always stood out. Damn it.

One store I was ushered into had me go down some stairs, into a basement that reeked of mold. Where there’s mold, there’s compromised inventory. To the credit of their honesty, they didn’t even try to cover the smell – maybe the product of having tried and failed over time. To their credit, they had their display shoes in clear plastic bags that had seen much reuse. But the scent. I have seen what mold does to shoes. To walls. How it secretes itself insidiously on everything. And then I remembered this plaza for the work my father had done on their electrical. I remembered the owner, who I am certain has not changed.

I was permitted an opening as the worker spoke with someone else very seriously about why their shoes were better priced than anything else in the area – but the price for the shoes I would put on my feet was still higher than what I saw in Detour. I went back to Detour, stood by the shoes and was attended briefly, they brought the shoes down and I purchased them without hesitation – 25% of the price of the majority of the shoes, 20% lower than comparable shoes where I saw them. The Syrian gentleman smiled slightly at this; he had seen me there 10 minutes earlier, he had seen what I did, and he also saw that I immediately put the new Nikes on and tossed the others, leaving them with box and bag.

Hands swinging.

I walked up further, finding new spaces where old ones were. The sidewalk was the same. The street smelled the same – that odor of dry season dust with the occasion of stale urine. No one talks about that pungent aroma in cities when they say that they love them. New York. Orlando. Dallas. Honolulu. Panama. Managua. Port of Spain. San Fernando. The list goes on about which brochures should have scratch and sniff photos.

Or the smell of the casual vagrant. That lurid smell of sweat upon layers of sweat, a topology on the sinuses not easily forgotten.

A new book store. A casual conversation revealed why there were only books marketed to women (read: romance) on the shelves, though it was spared 50 Shades of Bad Writing by the Muslim owner. Another bookstore I frequented with it’s meager selection poorly laid out so it seemed like they had more of a variety.

I stopped in one store, saw an old school friend who worked there and we chatted. Caught up.

I left High Street, striding home in new shoes and old memories, thinking as I kept an eye on the shadows near my own and the sound of footfalls behind me – a habit over the years. I thought about how big High Street had been for me in the 1980s, and how small it seemed now.

When I was younger, it was a window to the world. Thriving. Knowledge I craved was pooled in bookstores that no longer exist. The street had become smaller not because I had gotten larger, but because it was a window into what could sell in a country where the buying power of the average citizen limited choices of what businesses could bring in and make a profit from. The only local thing was a side stall of leather belts and sandals, a throwback to a forgotten age when Medford Gas Station was at the bottom of High Street.

The walk told me what I already knew. San Fernando had changed but not grown, just as the rest of Trinidad and Tobago. Perhaps it was the error of my younger eyes to have seen so much potential.