Memory Lane Tuesday, October 3, 2023

 

 

I had to hurry to get to the bank yesterday in order to keep a check from bouncing.

Walking down Bergenline Avenue reminded me of life in Paterson and Passaic, especially Passaic, when I often had to hurry up from my apartment on 8th Street to get to the bank for similar reasons.

Bergenline Avenue is a bubble in time, a throw back to a time before cell phones and the internet, although there were plenty of pedestrians staring down into their tiny screens along the sidewalk, and plenty of scooters darting in between.

I miss living in Passaic, although I never imagined I would feel that way when I actually lived there all so many years ago, the simplicity, being poor and yet happier than having so many things on my shoulders that I carry around these days, Atlas with a world of troubles.

I went back to Passaic a few weeks ago, touring that portion where I lived when I lived uptown, crossing over along Paulison Avenue, all the way into Clifton, passed places that have significance only in memory such as the Clifton Auto store, where we – Louis, Pauly, Garrick, Hank and me – got a flat tire on Christmas Eve when Hank was driving us to our usual Christmas Eve destinations.

We were enthusiastic. We all leaped out of the car, intending to quickly change the tire for the spare only to find that Hank had never repaired the spare from the previous year’s Christmas eve flat tire.

A frustrated Garrick grabbed Hank’s hat and threw it in the air, only to have it get hooked on the “N” in Clifton Auto. When he leaped up to retrieve the hat, the hat came down but so did the “N”, which became a running joke for years each time we passed the place because it remained “Clifto Auto.”

The location is still an auto shop, but no longer under that name, and ironically another business opened a block or so away that specialized in repairing flat tires.

I walked through that field of memories all the way into Clifton to Clifton Avenue where the old Clifton Theater once stood, long ago demolished to make way for a drug emporium, carrying away the memories of when I worked there as an usher with Ralph – my friend from grammar school, with whom we picked up and made out with girls in the dark corners of the theater.

Not only was the theater gone, but Ralph, also, passing away some ten years ago in some remote corner of Pennsylvania. Hank passed away long before that. Pauly more recently, and so my walk through that place and back along Lexington Avenue to Passaic again was through a graveyard of ghosts – the concrete Weasel Brook Park paved over for development, the Fine Arts Theater (full of its dirty movies as far back as the 1950s) turned into a adult video and book store, and the Capital Theater – with is classic strip tease and rock and roll venue – a parking lot for a Burger King, and the Montauk Theater – the last of the XXX shops along with the Palace Strip Club leveled to make way for a new school.

Still, enough of old Passaic remained, stores lining two sides of Main Avenue that looked pretty much the same as when I lived there, and the people – as with Bergenline – much the same, clutching cell phones and shopping bags, even on Sunday, a long stroll through past and present, though it is clear even that part of the world is changing, new luxury buildings displacing the poor, just as they are on Bergenline, and you have to wonder, where do all the poor go when all of the old places vanish?

 

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Tuck the cat Monday, October 2, 2023

Memory Lane Tuesday, October 3, 2023

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Tuck the cat Monday, October 2, 2023

 

 

Our outside cat, Tuck, returned last night, once again wounded, hobbling with one leg lifted from an injury to his upper chest from yet another fight with other ally cats.

This gray terror, however, loves us, if he is something of a problem child and a risk to pet when he’s in pain or in the wrong mood.

He’s been terrorizing other neighborhood cats for several years and has come back to our place more than once in such a condition.

But he’s just too temperamental for us to get into a cage and take him to a vet, though we might have to engage him this time if the swelling doesn’t go down soon.

I have an animal spray for open wounds, only I risk losing one or more fingers when I attempt to apply it. I manage to get him to ingest animal antibiotics from the local health food store, and I pat him down with calm down ointment that allows him to sleep (he’s currently lying curled up at my feet as I type).

But the most we can do is keep him comfortable, allow him to use our bed when we’re not sleeping in it, and hope he will recover.

He hates being cooped up in the house, even though he’s an aging alpha male, and can barely contend with the younger Turks that he once could keep at bay with a growl.

Even wounded, he wants to go back out, only we won’t let him.

We tried keeping him in the house all the time, allowing him sole possession of my office and our bedroom on the second floor. But he protests as if a scene from some prisoner of war movie, insisting we let him out. His life is outdoors, even if it means fighting.

He’s staying in now only because I refuse to let him leave until he’s healed. This, of course, means he may later be reluctant to come back inside, figuring we might keep him in even when he’s healthy.

Most times, I let him out in the morning with the hopes he’ll return before dark, and we can keep him safe during the night when it is most likely he will engage in violent behavior.

This works up to a point. But the last time I let him out, he stayed out all day and all night and most of yesterday, returning hobbling and in pain.

If we can manage to get him to the vet, we will get him fixed the way we did with his former chief adversary, Sweeney, who is a Norwegian forest cat someone abandon and whom we belief Tuck beat up. Sweeney was easier to handle and get to the vet, where we got him treatment and fixed, and now lives downstairs, where he can glare at Tuck through the glass door from our living room.

Sweeney, however, started out as a domestic cat; Tuck did not.

Tuck is fierce and can be unpredictable. I’ve been bitten and scratched more than once, although not recently, and he sometimes climbs on my chest when I pet him, purrs and mothers – his long claws leaving marks on me he doesn’t intend.

When in his current condition, he follows me from room to room, and likes when I talk to him, as I am doing now, telling him what a great cat he is, telling him how much I hope he will heal, and telling him sooner or later we’re going to get him to the vet – regardless of how many of my fingers he bites in the process.

 

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Lost in the woods again

 

 
July 15, 1982
 
Louise is gone; back to the scene of the crim: Ken’s Woods.
She and her best friend, Chris (still unlaid since October), Ruby and Shawn, pitching that blue tent of theirs on the semi-level ground, setting out their cooking things on the table for the flies, chipmunk and ground squirrels.
They’ve gone from Scranton again (it seems the least excuse will do to avoid that place). Yet Louise never really abandons it, like a perennial flower, returning every year or two for her burst of sunlight.
She has put down pegs to her tent in Scranton, and to pull them up means more pain than just to leave them planted, accepting the pain she knows for the uncertain pain elsewhere.
Yet even now, Louise is changing, adjustments coming after years of failed relationships, the men she’s know having used her repeatedly, but never loved her.
Her child (our child) clings to her like an albatross, growing heavier with every passing year, holding her back from the absolute freedom she craves, a haunting need that goes back even to 1975 when she asked me what I thought if she decided to put Ruby up for adoption.
I wonder if she still thinks this, and whether or not she ever told Rudy, the two of them sleeping side by side at that camp site like hibernating bears, Louise dreaming of leaving Scranton, Ruby praying her mother doesn’t get wander lust again.
Even with its college, Scranton is a trap, a decaying world with no options for advancement, walled in by its limitations, growing each day into a ghetto like where I live in Passaic.
Rudy asked what I see in all the books I read, and doesn’t completely understand when I reply, caught up in some oversimplification of the world the way Wordsworth was in his perception of nature.
Louise doesn’t question it, satisfied with the limitations of her world, haunted by it as the same time, not complete understanding how books can be key to their way out.
In this, I agree with Pauly, when he says every human being has about the same amount of potential. Some tap it in differed ways, some not at all. Some spend their lives dedicated to finding themselves, some accept being permanently lost.
 
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The end of Time

 

October 2, 1981

 

Twisted maple trees lean in on the river here, heads heavy with still green leaves, like nature’s answer to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but dying slowly as their trunks split, exposing their empty interior time with rot out and send each limb into the fast-moving water below.

All this makes me feel sad, thinking how many footsteps my ancestors took here, having no doubt passed this place when these trees just took too root, as scattered as the seeds the tree has cast, flowing down a river of time that inevitably leads us all to the sea.

Back then, we all believed the roots we put down would keep us here, bound to this land and outlining our future, my grandfather and his grandfather before him foolishly believing if they delved deep enough into this red soil nothing would move them, surviving all the storms that came and went since them, much as these trees have, giving root to new saplings destined to inherit this earth when our time passed.

A gentle rain comes this morning, giving a shimmer to the leaves on the new trees and old, the last gasp of an Indian Summer before the deep freeze comes, all sharing the same bounty, all thinking they will survive until the spring.

Nobody knows if any of us will, these trees leaning in from the side of the river, roots drinking from the rising and falling tides, struggling through each drastic change they can never predict, even though they live with the changes of season, the rise and fall of the river, the freeze and the melting, the falling of leaves and their rebirth, aware if at all, of the other trees going through the same ritual.

My grandfather used to bring his sons here to fish, eating what they caught before anyone realized just how deadly that was, the product of the old German chemical plant upstream feeding poison into the water for so many years it has sunken deep into the mud for the bottom crawling cat fish to absorb, we all somehow living through it all, watching the change come so subtly we do not realize what has happened until it has happened, at which point it is too late for alter it.

I keep thinking of these trees as silent witnesses to it all, watching the world pass, and our lives passing through it, watching the gulls that swirl above us, the fish the swim below, and all that flows along with surface, or cling to it, the leaves that fall and float downstream, the turtles that ride old pieces of driftwood, characters in a drama we too share.

Now at the end of their lives, these trees still watch the river sweeping by, the madness of the falling leaves, the detritus washed down the banks from River Drive and the Wall Street Bridge with every rain, the muddy flood that looks sometimes as red as blood, trees that serve as sentinels to our lives even as the river and the rain conspire to undermine them, digging out their roots, causing the rot inside trunks we all assumed would be there forever, even after we have gone.

I come here every day, standing where my family stood, seeing what they could not see, the end of time.

 

 

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Lion and the lamb

 

 

March 6, 1982

 

The old adage seems to be true that March comes in like a lion; hopefully it will go out like a lamb.

The wind is up, with winter still clinging to its edges as I job up River Drive in Garfield. Above me, a vivid blue sky hosts scores of puffed-up clouds that seem immune to the movement here on the ground, sunlight still pink around the tips of trees, gulls and geese crying forlornly around me as if they have lost their way, having come back too soon from the south, or having never left, stranded in this chilly day.

The tall grass, still yellow from last fall, sways along the sides of the river where the night releases its hold reluctantly, revealing slowly the imprint of footsteps that have passed between the tree trunks – fishermen who poke their bait through the cracks of ice, or the homeless from the camp on the Dundee Island side searching for firewood they can burn to keep warm – crossing the rail bridge near Monroe Street where the freight trains once crossed to feed the ever-hungry appetite of the German chemical plant, rusted rails showing along the street on this side, pointing the way to an industry long gone or on the verge of extinction, me striding in the footsteps of my ancestors as if a ghost, haunting this space each morning as I make my way up from Passaic, pausing at the riverside near the silver-sided Service Diner for coffee before retracing my steps back to the comfort of my cold water flat, embracing March as the arrival of a new season that won’t become evident yet for weeks, windy March stirring up in my blood the ache for warmth, stirring me the way it does the reeds, as if we are all somehow connected, each waiting for the lamb to arrive once the roar of the lion ceases.

 

 

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Counting reeds in winter

 

 

January 15, 1980
 
Who counts the reeds in winter, these stiff soldiers standing near the shallows of the Passaic River where Washington crossed in his retreat, leaning forward, heads heavy with the frost, swaying stiffly with the gusts of wind, the sound like the crackling of fire or breaking of ice, lined up across the river from where I sit with my morning coffee, gulls swirling near the back of the Service Diner where the vents sent out waves of heat along with the scent of fried eggs, bacon and coffee the truckers consume.
For all the sounds of the city around me, there is a strange silence, winter muffling the usual diatribe of traffic, and yet lets loose the smaller sounds coming from under the bridge across the water, the sound of falling icicles as the trucks rumble over from the mills on one side to the road leading to the highway on the other.
A few ducks and geese compete with the floating coffee cups and bottles in those rare spaces of water the ice has yet to cover, oak roots building little lean-tos over them, an old dock with splintered wood and rusted hinges providing shelter, the clatter of the moving reeds like music around us, an unintended soundtrack for a winter we struggle to endure, mocked with the shrill voices of the laughing gulls who swirl overhead, and me, in the midst of them all, counting things that do not need to be counted, wondering where I fit in all of this.

 
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