THE DOCTOR IS IN!

"When you're alone/and life is making you lonely/you can always go..."

Downtown.

No coincidence that this song is one of a few wildly popular hits in the last part of this century that does not deal with romantic love as its central theme. To be popular, a song has to deal with something that is deeply enough engrained in the universal human experience that people want to hear about it more than once.

If the internet has seemed dominated by desires to extend universally the central jewels of human activity, it is now shrinking back to set up its territories. People look for or are developing sites that talk about not just themselves, as in the delectably self-indulgent personal page rife with family photos, but sites for their cities, their block, their club, their gang; and often, their downtown. It may be a business directory or it may be intense local gossip.

My husband actually witnessed two young humans in the public library of Billings, Montana, at adjacent terminals, using an internet chatroom to speak with each other.

Luckily, most of our neighborhoods and just about all of our downtowns are not quite that small. The notion of a neighborhood--as well as the notion of a downtown being a step above a neighborhood-are ideas that folks my age developed long before cyberspace.

Very long ago, when I was walking and talking and could command all of the space I could put my feet on while still attached to my mother's hand, I had a feeling for the neighborhood. I had to be on the best behavior to sit on someone else's steps or play in someone else's yard. But it was not until a bit later that I could go downtown.

Downtown was farther than I could reach on foot, even with my mother's hand attached. We had to take the car, for parking the old '48 Plymouth took a bit of planning. There would always be some walking to be done subsequently. But most important; here, unlike going out in the neighborhood, some preparation was required. I had to get "dressed up." I would meet either people I already knew (from synagogue, for the community was largely Jewish) or I could always meet somebody I did not know yet.

The fact that I never got to talk to any part of a stranger's anatomy higher than his or her kneecaps was often a problem Sometimes I could find a chair, or get lifted onto a counter. I was already a butterball, however, and it was an effort.

There was a comfortable routine; people to be seen, things to be done. Everyone was friendly and I got lollypops or head-pats in great abundance.

There was occasionally a drunken person on a side street but they were deliberately ignored.

If my father got a letter from a foreign country relative to his music-writing, which happened often, no matter where that letter came from, it always was delivered by the hand of Daddy's friend Harry behind the counter. When I was with my grandmother, may she rest in peace, we went to Mr. P's grocery because his kosher smoked salmon was the tastiest of all. Sometimes he gave me a little free piece and I would make such loud "MMMMM" sound he would say it was good for business.

Anything you really wanted or needed that was not sitting in a store window, like a washing machine, could be ordered at the Sears catalog office ceremoniously, from a smiling and congratulatory attendant.

This is, as far as I can figure, the ideal of Main Street that Disney was wise enough to plant at the very front of his Anaheim theme park. There it serves, literally, as the opening to world of fantasy. How clever to open fantasy with familiarity, to assist with the suspension of disbelief. How clever to give people an echo of the Victorian and neo-classical storefronts which, although they may be a trifle more difficult to ferret out of larger eastern inner cities, are part of the collective consciousness of America's smaller towns.

When I was quite young, my parents took me to Eliot Sagan's lectures for children at the Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. He certainly put up with a flood of questions from me, but one overwhelming memory of something he said has ascended into my mind's eye nearly every time I have looked as pictures of heavenly bodies. He said that the straight lines that you see from the air, like the tilled edges of fields you see from an airplane, were signs of civilization. That where there was civilization, we would be sure that we were hot on it's train when we saw, on the surface of a planet, straight lines.

I thought sure those straight lines could only have been Main Streets. I was convinced, for a brief shining portion of my existence, that the entire universe was made of downtowns like Chelsea, Massachusetts. All those extraterrestrial little kids had to old onto their mother's hands when they went downtown. They must all be the same. And getting from one to the next; well, if a car or train couldn't do it, they just needed better planes.

How many children think the whole world is like 27th Street of Billings, Montana, and so very pretty with Christmas lights in the snow?

Although I have not, to date, made it to an extraterrestrial Main Street, I have enjoyed several American Main Streets. A great deal of my career has been spent in America's midsection. After all, a resident physician does not want to live terribly far from the hospital, and never makes enough money to buy one of the mansions that most people imagine doctors to inhabit.

So in Fargo, North Dakota and Minneapolis, Minnesota, I lived pretty much in the middle of downtown. In Cincinnati Ohio and in Wichita, Kansas, I lived fairly close to downtown and visited often. For a few weeks in Billings Montana, my husband and I lived in a hotel less than a block from the office building where I worked.

I became a member of the strange sort of demi-monde that inhabited the downtown. The tiny apartment buildings above stores or the apartment building no more than a block removed from the main street housed people who were often as disenfranchised from society as that tiny girl who held her mother's hand. Lonely men who frequented bars, fragments of families who found lower rents, people who were in professional situations where a house and a nuclear family were both dreams.

Both my parents had realized those dreams a generation before. My grandfather, a pawnbroker, was able to raise his family in the city, but in a home a few streets away from downtown. My grandmother lived above the tiny grocery store she had run with her husband until there was enough money for the suburban house that my brother and I grew up in.

My family never seemed entirely happy that I was living in downtowns; it was some sort of a socioeconomic regression to past times. It meant exposure to the things that they had wanted to protect me from.

I will never forget that fateful moment when a psychiatric patient with a bottle in a bag recognized me when I was strolling through a downtown park in Wichita, Kansas. He offered "Dr. G" a "swig." I politely declined, for a plethora of reasons: moral, hygienic, you name it. But it could only have happened in a downtown.

Sometimes people bashed in the windows of my car, presumably looking for drugs which I would never carry with me. Sometimes they confronted me. More consistently, in many downtowns, unknowns have asked me for drinks and money and other things which they are certain not to get.

If that were all there were to a downtown, I wouldn't like them.

There is a sort of tension walking a Main Street in the upper Midwest. You may find something you might like to own in a shop window, or an exhibit you like at the museum, or someone you work with, or just a cold gust of wind.

There is a chance of "connecting." Not in the anonymous way that someone connects on the internet, but eye-to-eye contact. It can be both anonymous and intimate at the same time. And the feeling of those impending encounters can be like being on a knife edge, but the results can be worthwhile.

It is perhaps the excess of possibilities for eye-to-eye contact that makes crowded sidewalks, like those of New York, seem so daunting.

Once, walking down Main Street in Fargo, I found a previously empty store window filled with old books. They turned out to be ancient, with many old medical books in French, and I had many long and pleasant chats with the proprietor.

The search to connect on Main Street may be far more deliberate. In the post-Civil War era Douglas Avenue in Wichita had been famous, according to antique newspapers I saw there, for young "swells" parading their fancy new carriages up and down the way. When I was there it was more sports cars and boom-boxes and kids in jeans with the brand names clearly visible. Didn't seem to me it had changed much.

But is the Disney "Main Street" truly American? Linear streets have been of some importance everywhere there have been streets, I guess, but the idea of a single Main Street seems often to follow the railroad tracks where a "new" city has sprung up. The few larger European cities that I know seem to have been more concentric in their growth than linear. Amiens, France had "centers;" one around the marketplace where I lived, the old Bell-Tower or "Beffroi" from the days of feudalism. For all cities where I saw cathedrals, there was a "Place" or open square around the periphery of the cathedral, from which streets radiated.

Paris started on an island in the middle of the Seine river. They christened the place "Lutecia" which means "mud" and it has certainly grown every which way, essentially concentrically, since.

Larger cities in America, like New York seem to have neighborhoods that serve as little downtowns. We seem to continue to seek personal microcosms of the too-big--to--truly-possess world that we can give a seal of possession. But it is more an ideal than a reality. Disney knew better than to encumber his "Main Street" with shops that were practical or went with their titles. He put an audioanimatronic Abraham Lincoln on the stage of his theater--not in a balcony where we could think of him as having been alive or maybe getting shot.

Nor could Disney be expected to show us any drunk or homeless as they existed even in the Victorian era. But we have the sense of expectation. The ideal. The image of the Main Street as the interface with the world where you might meet someone you wish you didn't or someone you're glad you did or that you already know. But the edge, the excitement, of having both a familiar setting and a window on an as-yet-unseen world is comfortable ideal.

Several efforts have been made to reproduce it in cyberspace. Try

Disney

COPYRIGHT 1998 ESTELLE TOBY GOLDSTEIN, M.D.