Even today I feel it.  A tingle, a shiver climbing up my
spine, the kind you feel when apprehensive about something
to come, this is what I feel when I recall the old gray
bridge on Euclid Avenue. I'm sure thousands of cars drive
under it every day, I myself drove under it several times
when I had no other choice. Each time, that same tingling
feeling occurred. To this day, I wonder why.

Maybe I should tell you about the bridge. It's a railroad
bridge. The tracks, several, lead from Cleveland east,
crossing Ohio, Pennsylvania, and terminating in Grand
Central Station in New York, but that's not the point. The
point is that The Bridge serves as a barrier of sorts, on
one side the atmosphere of the elite Case Western Reserve
University, the museums, the symphony hall, and on the other
side, abruptly, the gray slums of East Cleveland, with their
vacant storefronts, boarded up tenements, gangs of bored
youths eying, warily, any outsider brave or fool enough to
venture into their territory. On one side, classy University
Circle, as it is called by Clevelanders, and on the
other...

A forgotten memory rises, slowly, to the surface, and
penetrates my consciousness. We're standing there, the three
of us, a mother and her two girls. One of the girls can
sense the pungent smell of fear, she feels the sweat of her
mother's palm grasping her small hand. She knows that her
mother can't control the situation, which mothers should do
when you're five years old, and something that her mother
usually does...why isn't the bus coming? Is there a bus that
can take us home, to our quiet street, our safe street? What
are we doing here?

The girl suddenly notices something. A store! It's unusual
to see a store built under a bridge, she thought to herself,
but who cares? Maybe in the store she won't be so scared,
maybe her mother won't be scared. Maybe someone can help us
get home...
I think that someone in the store helped us, because I
remember the safety of a bus, the familiar advertisements (I
knew all of them because I rode the buses frequently back
then), the white noise of the engine moving us forward to
safety.

The years passed and my life remained intertwined with The
Bridge. Piano lessons, art lessons, everything that the good
side of The Bridge had to offer. I could always see it (even
though I almost always managed, with my indefatigable
survival instinct, to avoid it).  There it was, straddling
Euclid Avenue. We eyed each other warily, like two
adversaries eying each other before a duel. But you're just
an inanimate hulk of metal! I would seethe, more to myself
than to it. But you're not...you're hiding a secret.

I don't live in Cleveland any more. I deal with different
fears today, enemies (mostly) real and (some) imagined. A
mysterious man wearing a long heavy coat boarding a bus. A
killer tumor destroying the body of a loved one.

I can't see The Bridge, only in my mind's eye. All that
remains are the chills that climb, slowly, up my spine
whenever I see it.