My friend lives on the tree streets in Bangor, near Eastern Maine Medical Center. If you’re not familiar with Bangor, the tree streets, named for trees, define a desirable section of the city, a neighborhood of shaded backyards, where you can walk your dog to a park down the street past a mixture of single-family homes and rentals.

My friend and her husband would like to get rid of one of their cars. But they both have jobs. And despite living in one of the better parts of town, they find themselves stranded when it comes to basic services.

“How do you go grocery shopping without a car?” she asked me recently. “I live in a food desert. The nearest grocery stores are all about three miles away. And there’s no convenient bus you can take to any of them.”

A quick glance at Bangor’s geography proves her point. Though the neighborhood is dotted with what I call “beer stores,” there’s no place nearby to purchase produce, meats, grains and spices to cook tonight’s dinner. The nearest grocery stores are the Hannaford on Broadway, the Hannaford at the Bangor Mall, and the Shaw’s on Main Street.

“There’s no real food within easy reach of bus or bicycle,” my friend says. “I’m stuck in a walking neighborhood with two cars.”

To get to the Hannaford on Broadway, my friend would have to meet the incoming Old Town bus on State Street, change to the Center Street bus downtown, and then repeat the process in reverse with groceries. A trip to Shaw’s would likewise require two buses, the Old Town and the Hampden bus, which no longer runs on Saturdays. To get to the Hannaford at the Mall, she would need to walk several blocks to and from Mount Hope Avenue.

All three are reachable, with some effort, on a bicycle, but grocery shopping by bike requires some sturdy containers and limits the amount of food you can bring home.

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I also tried to shop at stores within a small radius of my home, although this was not always possible. It’s surprising how far you may have to go for an ink cartridge or a cantaloupe. I bought bread at local bakeries and meat and vegetables at the farmers’ market. (Beer, needless to say, was never a problem.)

But my friend’s conundrum raises an interesting question, independent of whether or not her neighborhood is adequately served by the bus. Why has it become next to impossible to buy real food anywhere but a supermarket? What has happened to drive neighborhood grocery stores into extinction? Why does it seem so hard for small, pedestrian-oriented stores to stay in business?

You can hardly fault the bus system for not linking all neighborhoods conveniently to grocery stores. The dominance of large stores pushes people into cars, even if they want to walk, bus and bicycle more. Those stores are always surrounded by large parking lots off major traffic avenues, where parking is free and everything is geared to the car. There’s a drive-through ATM nearby, and a drive-thru Dunkin’ Donuts and a drive-thru Taco Bell. Every economic incentive encourages businesses to cater to car customers. We design and build our cities on an automotive rather than a human scale.

People who use the bus to do their grocery shopping not only have to make more frequent trips to the store, on each trip they’re helping to pay for people who drive there. Shaw’s and Hannaford pay to keep up their parking lots, and a bit of that cost gets passed along to every customer. But bus passengers, pedestrians and bicyclists don’t need parking spaces. Why should they pay for them?

Incentives that steered people in the other direction – away from their cars rather than into them – might include discounts on groceries with a monthly bus pass, and subsidies for smaller neighborhood stores.

My friend speaks wistfully of opening a small neighborhood market and offering cooking classes in conjunction with it. Would such an idea take off? Who knows? Evidence suggests it would be difficult. It’s easier to go to the drive-thru for a burger and leave the shopping for the weekend. It’s also a preposterous way to live. Food for thought.

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He may be only my second-favorite living left-handed Beatle, but I’m stoked that Ringo Starr is bringing his All-Star Band to Bangor this month (Wednesday, June 8, at the Cross Center). The Dave Mathews Band is on the waterfront that same night, and as I wrote in an earlier post, traffic is likely to be nightmarish. It doesn’t matter to me, though, because I live within walking distance of both venues.*

Some scoff at Ringo’s contribution to the seminal rock band of the Sixties. He got lucky, they say; he rode to fame on the coattails of his more talented band mates. There are hundreds of better drummers, they claim, and thousands of better songwriters.

Ringo didn’t write many songs, but almost every Beatles album has a “Ringo song” on which he sings lead vocal. On some it’s a Lennon-McCartney gem: “With A Little Help From My Friends” or “Yellow Submarine.” On others, it’s a goofball cover like “Act Naturally.” I love “What Goes On?” from the British Rubber Soul, on which Ringo shares a writing credit with John and Paul.

One Ringo original keeps popping up in my consciousness, though: “Don’t Pass Me By,” from the White Album. Like everything else on that record, it’s eclectic and a little bit weird. A fiddle noodles along throughout. And it contains this inane lyric:

I’m sorry that I doubted you, I was so unfair
You were in a car crash, and you lost your hair

What? You lost your hair? That’s the best rhyme Ringo could come up with? No wonder he didn’t write many songs. Compare it to the Beatles’ other noteworthy car-crash song, “A Day in the Life,” which spawned a worldwide rumor that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car and the band was covering up his death.

The canon of car-crash songs is vast and varied, but the template for the genre is found in songs such as “Tell Laura I Love Her,” by Ray Peterson and “Last Kiss,” by Wayne Cochran. Both song come from the 1950s and the aftermath of the death of James Dean. Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking, if mangled, corpse.

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___

I was in the middle of writing this week’s post when I heard that Muhammad Ali had died. How can Muhammad Ali be dead? He was so much larger than life. I was an upper middle class white boy, and I loved Muhammad Ali. He made a brutal sport beautiful. He composed poems about his opponents. And he called the war in Vietnam for what it was, at great personal cost, long before public opinion came around to his side.

He had a singular moment in Maine, too. Perhaps the most famous Ali photo of all was taken at the Colisée in Lewiston as he stood over Sonny Liston after knocking him out in the first round of their rematch.

Shortly after I moved back to Maine from the west coast in 1999, the Maine Sunday Telegram (jumping the gun by a year) ran a rundown of the Top 100 Maine Sports Stories of the 20^th Century. Reading it, I chuckled. The Ali-Liston fight was number four, behind two high school basketball stories and something I’ve since forgotten.

Only in Maine, I thought, would high school basketball be considered, especially in retrospect, more important than a world figure authoring a signature moment of his career.

Among the many images circulating online in the hours after Ali’s death were photos of him with the Beatles. It’s the month before Ali’s first fight with Liston, in 1964, and the Fab Four are on their first tour of America. They are all between the ages of 20 and 23 with the whole world ahead of them. Ali is a head taller than all of the Beatles. In one photo, he has picked up Ringo in his arms and holds him like a rag doll. All five beam for the camera.

An era is passing. Only two of the five exuberant young men in that photo are left, and one of them will be in Bangor Wednesday night.

* Full disclosure: I’ll be working as an usher at the Cross Center for the Ringo show. I hope to see a few of my friends, and a little bit of history.