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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A winters day on the riverside

 

 

January 23, 1980
 
We leave it so, this landscape of dead reeds with frosted heads poking up out of the horizon of the river, the water cutting through the world like a still bleeding wound, separating this side from that side, when both sides are largely the same – the mill owner who once thought to build docks here in Garfield, then fleeing to the far side where the water rushed passed fast and could supply him with the power he needed, now lost in the rising mists, a faded memory even my grandfather can’t recall, or even my grandfather’s grandfather, reeds rigid in the frigid air, swaying so stiff as to crack, their clatter evident only when traffic along River Drive ceases with light at the Outwater Lane bridge.
It all looks so clean this time of year, the pipes from the chemical plant spewing less poison, though the steam from the fabric mill swirls out over the surface like fog, swirling around the remnants of snow that look like white tuffs of cotton or wool, the wood chips of fallen trees scattered over them. Nobody notices the red stains on the concrete near the mouth of each pipe, red that in other seasons glistening with poisonous purple and green.
I jog up River Drive each morning, always pausing here at the foot of the Dundee Dam, where the manmade waterfall keeps back the heaviest of the water flow while at its foot stones pepper the floor the river, along small islands thick with trees and wilting reeds, sea gull swirling overhead in a perpetual hunt for food, searching for the breaks in the ice where they might dive deep and come up with the fish that bury themselves in the warmth of the mud at the bottom.
In my head, I imagine the conversations that must take place among them, this battle of the fittest, and wonder just how it must feel to be truly free, and how their embrace their own lives, these quaint and not so innocent souls living in a wilderness framed in concrete, each generation witnessing the slow decline what was built here to contain them.
My grandfather knew this river as did his grandfather, building houses along its shores to accommodate the flow of Lower East Side Jews and Italians to work in the mills, his time passing into the time of my uncles who could still swim in this river considered among the most polluted in the world, leaving me as the next generation to stand on this shore, to greet this generation of seagulls and swallows, to somehow get from them the secret truth none but a few have found before me.
And still the mills spout smoke, painting the gray sky grayer, me, standing in awe of it as if in a great temple, the churn of unseen machinery like a chant, echoed a bit by the grind of truck gears over the bridge or the hum of the exhaust fan from Service Diner’s kitchen, the scene of coffee and cooking mingling with diesel and stream. It is music I can barely comprehend, an essay filled with metaphors I do not understand, and yet I dare not miss a note or a shift in a paragraph, unable to keep up with it all as the water tumbles over the fall, losing me in the mists.
I don’t even know why I insist on stopping here, staring down at the membrane of ice, like a thinning overstretched balloon, ready to burst, giving birth to something I can’t imagine but which has always existed here, something I need to be apart of, and yet is more mirage than real.
A whistle blows from one of the mills – more steam rising. Men in work clothes come out, some carrying brooms, others tools, still others lunch buckets for a meal still two hours away, the mid-morning break that lets them out, as they sit or stand on the walls on the far side of the river, drinking coffee from vacuum bottles, each lighting a cigarette and so adding to the gray sky with each exhaled breath.
If they notice the river, it is not in the same way I do.
Their memories are not my memories, even though many of my memories are really the memories of family members who told me of what life was like here, the uncles who sailed this place in boats to fish, the cousins who scurried along the shore for bottles to return, my mother and father carrying me across from home to home when I was an infant, too vague a memory to be a memory at all, having married within view of the bridge near where I stand now, living their lives a century and a half after Washington retreated here.
The workmen cannot see the same thing I see, the spirit of the river stirring under the ice, the smear of gray gull wings against the gray sky, the slight color of pink from where the sun just barely shines through the thickening clouds, a sun just warn enough at times to crack the ice only to have the night refreeze it in an endless ritual that lasts until spring.
The whistle blows again; the workers vanish, one after the other, closing their coffee urns just as I finish the last drops in the now-cold cup I hold, they returning to labors inside the halls of that massive world of brick, while I climb back up to the road for the long jog back home and then to school, and work later, covering ground my ancestors covered, doing all that my ancestors have done, the gray sky growing grayer as I jog, hinting perhaps of snow.
 
 

Who counts the reeds in Winter?

(I have several versions of this written later – this is from a scrap of paper so I presume it is the first)

March 10, 1979

Who counts the reeds in winter, the dancing magicians tumbling head over heals with the frost, waving them straight and stiff in a sea of tan hair turned white upon the distant shore?

They are like soldiers dedicated to some foreign war, their drilled to the wave of a wand or the crack of the wind whipping them back into line.

Theirs is an ice-sleeved uniformed magic stirred to the beat of the traffic that passes over the arches of the old bridge, keeping guard to the thunder and rumble of wheels as alien to their world as Ezekiel’s wheel.

To keep they company, plastic cups float freely in the few melted spaces or rub shoulders with the roots of oak trees at the short, or even the praying metal spokes children’s boys that poke up out of the brown water growing brown themselves with the rust, all – reeds, bottles and toys – reaching desperately towards the sky that is beyond their grasp.

Who counts the reeds when the last wand passes and the ice-enslaved leaves break free, and bleed into the thawing water, or the trunks of trees crack, or the frozen branches snap – like bones suffering of age and surrender to the reality of passing years, rarely with but a whimper of cry, either to unfold and grow, or die?

The bloated gulls that hang above them do not count anything, but the few slivers of silver fish they snatch from the glistening surface, nor do the constantly complaining geese who themselves float in the free water like royalty, nor their smaller cousins, the ducks who mumble under their breath about the change, uncertain if it brings good or ill omens. The waving wand of wind gives them all other tasks to do at this time of year, casting their lot in with the rising of spring and the yet to be seen green that shows but hints at the tips of limbs, and the whisper of new reeds rising side by side with the frozen reeds, to rise up and take their place when the warmth finally comes.

Staring down Mother Nature

Sunday, January 12, 2014

The fog this morning isn’t as thick as it has been over the last few days, and though it usually causes havoc with my lungs, I’ll miss it.

When I can’t see the New York Skyline from the window of my Hoboken office, you know the fog is thick.

I spent part of Friday strolling along the shore of the Hudson River, thinking that Avalon would appear out from the remote waters – a King Arthur Legend I am particularly fond of.

I could see the water but not New York, and could see the ferries as they popped out from the white walls as if my magic, ferries that should have been fairies carrying passengers instead of mystical swords.

Some of the ruins of piers on the Hoboken side gave this an even more amazing feel, and I strolled along trying to glimpse thing in the over grown and twisted piers that the passing, uninterested masses would certainly miss.

Having a river within eye sight of where I sit each day renews me, in the same way the old Passaic did when I had to cross it twice or more a day, or could jog along it.

This intimacy, this tenderness of contact, is what I miss most about being close to water.

John Lennon used to boast about being the son of a sailor. I am, too, and the grandson of a boat builder on the other side of my family.

And though I tend towards seasickness in turbulence, I still tend to go to water to heal or to find inspiration, or to find myself in the mists of life’s fog – a condition that seems more prevalent as the years go on.

In the fog the sound of lapping water against the shore seems louder and competes with the daily grind that has brought civilization to the very brink, where industry and now real estate stares eye to eye with Mother Nature, and in this stand off, it is impossible to tell which one will prevail.

Our civilized ways have altered the environment in something sometimes called global warming, proof – despite the wishes of some deaf, dumb and blind religious leaders – that mankind has the wherewithal to undermine the creative wishes of God, and to turn this Garden of Eden god or accident has creative for us, into a wasteland.

We constantly thrust ourselves from Eden by taking too big a bite from the apple, this propelling ourselves forward with the illusion of progress. So these days, Mother Nature turns her fury towards us and lashes back, raising her waters over these streets.

Even the Native Americans knew better than to settle too close to water, but we don’t. We live with the arrogance of power we really lack. So our latest plan is to build walls to keep the rising water out so that the wealthy who must have views of water can live at the edge of doom – while wiser and poorer people elsewhere foot the bill with taxes rising nearly as high as the water.

So it is on foggy days like this I wonder as I walk if these foolhardy souls that cling to these shores still appreciate the view, the way I do, as the fairies come and go to the sound of water, and I wonder, who will win this staring contest – although in truth, I already know.

Unpredictable

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

It is not the deep chill that affects me most – though the tip of my nose feels as if bitten off by the frost – but the constant change of mood, the up and down, the sideways that won’t even let my old river rest in peace under its sheet of ice.

One year when my car crapped out in Passaic, Pauly – who was always begging rides to Quick Chek – made me walk with him instead, and crossing the Wall Street Bridge I noticed that the ice had stacked up on the surface of the river like ice cubes, all frozen together.

Years later, the Hudson River did the same when I could see look out my office window and still see a wider expanse of it.

But even though it is as cold now as it was then, the rough tumble and hefty lift of this changing environment won’t let the river alone, making it cool down or warm up in a way that must drive the fish as crazy as the weather drives me, neither of us knowing how to address this constant change, neither of us left alone long enough to adapt. Let it be cold, if it must be, or let the thaw come even if unnatural this time of year – although back when I lived in Passaic, part of the luxury of spring was basking in the new warmth when the thaw finally came.

Red river running red

June 21, 1980

The river is low and red today.

Low from lack of rain and red from the clay stirred up by struggling wildlife.

Except for the never ending hum of traffic along River Drive, the river seems silent – thirsty birds refusing to sing, starving ducks too hungry to even squawk. Even the usually boisterous ten-foot high waterfall just down stream whispers instead of roars, adding its red grime to the already bloody surface.

One guy – a factory worker – blames the chemical company for the constant ticket of waste we see dripping out pipes along the Garfield side.

A fisherman with pole pointed out towards the center of the river like an accusing finger blames the politicians.

“We elect them to do something and they do nothing,” he said. “So we elect somebody else and they don’t do anything either.”

The cop – sitting in his running car with windows open and a half devoured hamburger in his hand – blames the “hippies and the peaceniks” and their talk of saving the planet. He’s not the routine cop that used to beat up hippies for kicks, but a one time hippie who says he got sold a bill of goods, given hope that we could all save the planet. So he gave up and calls our kind “Commies” just as his father once did to him. Then, he speeds off in a gush of smoke and tires spitting gravel, all of which settles eventually on the river making it run that much redder.

I finish my coffee and continue my jog, going back along the river, passed the abandoned car lots and the crumbling buildings, passed the high towers of the brick mills with smoke spewing out of their stacks. But I look mostly at the river bottom where car bumpers, gar tires and hold shopping cars show, all the detritus we never notice until the river gets this low.

Someone ought to clean it up, I think, but know it won’t be me.

Cold day by the river

January 16, 1987

It isn’t too cold today. But I’m so out of shape that I can’t jog far when I try, huffing and puffing even before I get to the Monroe Street Bridge, a merely four city blocks from where I started.

I’m tempted to cross back, over the rail bridge and come back home through the park.

But I’m a little put off by the homeless people camping there, even though it is the shortest way back.

I huff and puff for another four blocks, walk three, run two, and reach the Dunkin Donuts at Outwater Lane where I buy coffee (but no donut) and walk the whole way back to Monroe Street sipping the coffee.

Worn out by the exertion, I cross over the rail bridge anyway, figuring I might be able to escape the homeless and their constant begging, and get home.

I almost make it, too, when I see him – a familiar face among the walking dead, although older than when I knew him in high school, looking older than he had a right to look considering we are the same age.

Worse, he sees me and remembers, and refuses look me in the eye.

I go up to him.

He tells me to go away.

I tell him no, and join him on the other side of tin can fire the homeless use here to keep warm. But they don’t keep it ablaze, adding only enough wood to keep the coals going at the bottom.

“You have a cigarette?” he asks me, his hands shaking as he forms the v between forefinger and middle finger in anticipation of a smoke.

“No,” I say. “I don’t smoke. Do you want me to find more wood for the fire?”

“No,” he says, glancing around. “I don’t want it too high. I nod off sometimes, and the fire spreads. Then the cops come. We’re not supposed to be here.”

“But if you don’t have anyplace else to go…” I say and then stop.

“Oh, they have a place for us. They usually take me to the police station first, and if they can’t find me a bed in a shelter, I stay there. It’s warm. But it’s not comfortable. It’s worse when they do. Then I get grilled by a social worker who always wants to know why I prefer being out here and not in a shelter.”

“It’s a natural question,” I say.

He gives me a dirty look, and then mumbles about telling them how he hates rules, and how they always tell him every place has rules.

“Not this place,” he says to me, warming his hands over the top of the can where there is very little heat. “Well, not many rules anyway. God, I hate the cold. I just hate being contained more. I had a job once, but the boss treated me so bad I told him I’d starve before I kept feeding his damned time clock.”

He blows on his hands. The nails are nearly black from either dirt or injury, I can’t tell which.

“People are always looking down on me,” he goes on. “Some people think I kind of deserve it. One time some bastard kids even tried to set me on fire while I was asleep. I don’t sleep much now because of that. I don’t have anything to steal. They just did it out of meanness.”

He looks over the top of the can at me, his dark eyes filled not with pain but rage.

“people are always asking me how I got here and why I didn’t want to get back to where I was. But to tell you the truth, I’ve spend most of my time trying to forget all that. Now I’m not exactly sure what I did, only that I didn’t want to be there any more.”

He glances over at a pile of rags, and a collection of odd things that someone had obviously thrown away.

“When I do sleep, I sleep there,” he says and points at his makeshift bed. “It’s tough enough getting myself up each day, especially on cold days like this. It’s tough finding enough to eat and staying warm until I can lay down again. I can’t be bothered trying to remember anything else. But on some mornings, when I see the ice dripping from the limbs of trees like today, I remember something, even if I don’t quite remember what.”

I don’t ask him any more questions. For a long time, we just stand there warming ourselves over a fire that isn’t a fire anymore and doesn’t produce heat enough to keep my fingers or toes warm. Then, I dig in my pocket and come out with the change I have left over from buying my coffee, and I dump it all – unasked for – into the palms of his dirty hands. Then, I head back home to a cold water flat that isn’t warm either, but it’s home, and I’m grateful for it, even if I do feed the boss’ time clock to keep a roof over my head.

Winter bliss

December 31, 1980

The decade ends with the river so low it might never refill, ice cracking from high tide leaving a landscaped filled with what looks like broken windows.

The coffee cup keeps my fingers warm as I stand on the dock and watch the last fast moving stream at the river’s center; its low gush filling the empty spaces between the rumble of trucks and cars on the bridge.

I feel as empty as the river and as naked as the trees, wishing I could cloth myself with evergreen for these dismal days.

The gulls’ cries makes this feeling worse, as if they and I are the last living things stranded in this winter tundra – even though I know a few other stragglers remain – ducks and geese left behind from the flight south their brethren have taken. A few ducks float in the low polls. A few swallows swirl out from the bridge’s stained arches. I even see a robin pecking at the frozen mud, which shows the recent footprint of a river mole or badger. These last at least are savvy enough not to be seen above ground during the day.

I even see a turtle half hidden under a log, and rats scurrying from shadow to shadow in some dark thievery over which all the birds squawk.

I ought to go home, giving up my daily jog half way through to try and warm my bones in a cold water flat I can’t afford to keep fully heated. I ought to dump my rapidly cooling coffee and buy a fresh cup if only to keep my fingers from freezing.

But I can’t move, caught up in some internal traffic jam the way the morning drivers are, unable to make sense of where I am or where I am going, needing all the more this sad and polluted river to flow again so as to carry me – like a fallen leaf – to the next stage of my life: me, the rats, the turtles, the moles, the robins and the sea gulls locked in this deteriorating winter bliss already desperate for spring thaw still too many months away to even contemplate.

Change of decade

Dec. 30, 1980

Pauly tells me a new decade doesn’t really start until the first year after the number change. So tomorrow officially ends the 1970s, leaving me to wonder what to expect.

We are officially almost two weeks into winder. But the river here still clings to some aspects of autumn – a handful of leaves fluttering on branches even as snow decorates the cracks of land at each trees’ feet.

Sunlight shimmers over the disturbed surface of the water, creating a landscape of flame, blinding me each time I look in that direction.

The chill draws the warmth of my run from me so that I clutch my cup of coffee to keep my fingers warm as I pay my respects to the newly fallen trees and tribute to other hearty souls who like myself brave this weather, bundled people flowing across the Outwater Lane bridge from the Garfield side to the jobs at the mills on the Passaic side of the river.

The bright sun casts web-like shadows across the river bank; the silhouettes of bare branches that seem to split open the earth and sky, a jig saw puzzle it will take the return of spring to solve.

Most people see winter as a dark season. But today, this is not true. Everything is too bright, too stark, painting in colors that seem unnatural to me.

Even the tan brick of the paper mills – which on other days seem as haunted as a vampire’s castle – seem unbearably cheery today, standing out against the vivid blue sky.

The wildlife, too, defies the season, a few ducks floating in ice-free pools near the shore, while wrens and swallows flit from branch to bridge and back again in their endless routine to keep warm.

I don’t quite ache for spring yet, but I wonder when it will come – each year bringing a different kind of spring at a slightly different time, a melting, dripping spring in some years, a dawning, dramatic spring in others.

I sip coffee, seeking to stay warm, greeting this new decade with more than a little trepidation, wondering if like spring what new features it will bring, a dripping muddy one or something that will explode on me with the unexpected.

That last Christmas with father

Dec. 12, 1980

It might be the gray sky laden heavy with the promise of snow that puts old Ben in the Christmas mood.

He has no use, he says, for the silly stuff he sees sprawled across some of the houses along River Drive.

His gaze studies the ducks on the nearby shore, whose swish their wet butts as they stagger from water to the muddy bank, as silly as circus clowns, he says, and they are silly – even if what they do is not.

They plop in and out of the water in pursuit of a fading livelihood we can’t see until they gobble one of the silver slivers.

Most of the trees are close to bar so the sky above seems cracked, shattered into a thousand crazy pieces like shards of ice.

Ben’s memory of Christmas is different from the one we celebrate, less full of “useless stuff” he sees while walking along the road, stuff sticking out the back of cars on their way home from the malls. His Christmas is full of little things. The river, he recalls, had many more trees along it, when as a boy, his father brought the family down to find a small pine tree they could bring home each year – not the oversized ones people kill in order to stick them up in their living room for a few weeks, but a seedling they could put in a corner so they could sit around it on Christmas Eve.

But Ben says he knew times were changing that one year when he went out and could not find one right away. Ben’s younger brother, Jim, was just old enough then to take the long walk around the river, but complained the whole time about the cold.

Ben’s dad, a wiry man, had grown ill over the previous year and Ben’s mother did not want him to make the trip. But the man insisted and went anyway.

Ben says he knew the older man would die soon. So did the man, and would not deviate from the ritual hew knew might well be his last.

Ben remember them leaving a train of footprints in the snow, and how smooth the frozen surface of the river looked, and how the sky looked then just as it looks today, and how hard he prayed for them to find a tree – and they did, the old man letting the boys cut it down and carry it home.

Ben remembers, too, the relieved look on his mother’s face when they three of them got home safe – and how she, Jim, Ben and little sister, Susan and the old man decorated the tree with a few strands of glittering tinsel and a few small white candles, and how for the last time, he shared Christmas with his father, who passed away the following spring.

Two Bridges Road

November 30, 1980

I don’t often job along this part of the river.

To get to Lincoln Park, the river twists so many times from where I usually run in Garfield, it almost seems like a different river, more gentile on the surface, but much more dangerous underneath.

This part of the river lives above all the principle falls, Little Falls, The Great Falls, and the Dundee Falls behind the Service Diner, and is hidden behind trees so dense people forget the river exists except to cross it on the various bridges or when the rains come and it rises above its banks to put them out of their homes.

This part of the river has great mood swings, swelling and then shrinking again, often for reasons few of us can comprehend in an endless string of contradictions.

Today, it is low and muddy, wearing an almost reddish-brown face that defies anybody to call it a body of water.

I barely see any of it as I jog along Two Bridges Road from the first bridge near Willowbrook Mall to the highway bridge in Pinebrook under which old black men fish, a scene so surreal with its droopy willows and summer batches of mosquitoes I might have jogged back through time to a post Civil War Savannah, Georgia.

Like in Rutherford, where I also sometimes job, this place has a park-like quality where trees line the road, but in a less rigid arrangement than Rutherford where concrete defines the boundaries of the river and civilization thrives high above the high water marks as to take a 100 year storm to cause serious flooding.

Here river and residents live side by side almost on an equal plain, struggling with each rain to define their right to exist.

The trees differ, too.  Rutherford is so prim and proper, spaces filled with trimmed hedges and lawns, while here, everything feels wild, like unkempt hair, spread out like an nature preserve the more conservative Rutherford would not tolerate.

Boulders left by the glaziers rise out of the water here like balding heads, weeds clustered around them and out of the cracks, and upon which seagulls roost.

These make this part of the river special to me since such boulders do not exist downstream along the Clifton or Garfield sections, and I often simply gawk at them like a tourist, and imagine the fun Dave and I would have had here during a river adventures as kids.

The air is cleaner here, too, lacking the all night spewing of factories or even the deceitful perfumed scent of the chemical factories which tries to hide the stench of the poisons they dump into the water when they think no one sees.

This place has plenty of traffic along the narrow two lane road that many use as a short cut around the often clogged Route 46 or Route 80. But walls of trees protect the river on the highway side while trees on this side seem to suck up the bad air with their canopy, and muffles the sounds so that this road is far quieter than River Drive in Garfield.

I jog in a dream here, and in some ways, it is distracting. In some ways, this isn’t the river I know and love, but some spruced up imposter who claims to be a distant relation and to me is not.

German potato salad

November 27, 1980

The water rides high between brown banks. Sea gulls cruise the gray sky, a sky pregnant with the promise of oncoming snow. The crisp wind rips at my face and snatches each plume of smoke Ben’s pipe produces as we sit along the riverside waiting for the snow to arrive.

A few ducks float on the oily water as brown as chunks of wood, and strangely silent – except for their cousins across the river who yap as they root through the reeds in search of food, flapping their wings when they find it to discourage others from taking it away.

Holidays make me nostalgic, and surprisingly, Ben, too.

He talks about how he used to visit his family in Pennsylvania this time of year, traveling by train through the Delaware Water Gap and up through the Pocono Mountains to some point near Scranton, and how much food waited for him when he arrive, mounts heaped as high as the mountains he had to pass through to get there, he says.

His family, like my grandmother’s, came from Germany, and more than a few of the dishes he recalls were German, although he says he missed German potato salad most.

“Quick Chek has German potato salad but it’s not the same,” he says.

He also says he misses the mountains as he stares out across the river at the distant cliffs that overhang Clifton, cracked rock laid bare by the coming of the cold and the waiting for snow to pain the brown rock white.

I ask Ben why he never went back, why he spends his days clinging to the side of this river when he misses other places so much.

“This is all I got,” he says, puffing hard on his pipe so that even the wind can’t steal all the smoke that gathers around his face. “All the rest faded away long ago.”

“Not the mountains,” I said.

“No,” he admits in a low voice. “Not the mountains.”

Escaping disaster to find salvation

October 24, 1981

This is one of those mornings of one of those days when the world just doesn’t sit right with you and you need something, but don’t know what, a day, week, maybe a life time vacation.

But I can’t stand Florida and I can’t afford to retire back to California without breaking into somebody else’s safe – and the last time the mob nearly got me, so that kind of thing is out. But I miss palm trees, and I would love to make the trip just to glimpse them again

But I’ve settled in a little too heavily into my place in Passaic, too many possessions to carry on my back, and too many to leave behind.

So I’m stuck.

Of course, I could take time off and make the trip the way ordinary people do, go back to Hollywood to see what has changed there, and if I’ll still cringe over some of the more painful memories I have of wandering those streets, those days when I thought I could deal drugs or that other stuff under the heavy heat of a movie camera for movies that no legitimate theater would ever show.

I’m not ashamed – but maybe embarrassed.

Although all in all the place was an incubator for a new me, someone who had gone there a naïve kid with a bundle of cash and came out broke, but rich in experience.

These days, I come here to find myself – collecting new memories or perhaps recalling earlier memories when this river was my life and my salvation, when I ran here not from mobsters with guns, or even the more serious pursuit of police. I came here to duck the impact of some prank gone wrong, and from the lawmen who wanted to drag me back to my uncles where they knew I would get heavier punishment than any court could administer.

What I got here surprised even me, less hide out than revelation, some sense of world beyond me.

While this place has changed greatly from when I wandered here as a boy, these changes are less severe than the changes to other place, somehow managing to heal itself in ways more civilized places cannot, restoring much of what once was after a fire when nothing is the same up the hill, or more the more intention destruction disguised as redevelopment.

I like this place because time has less impact here, and that the footprints of forefathers might well still be found somewhere in the muddy banks, or merely imitated by my own sneakers as I come to close to the brink.

The gulls that spread their wings as they soar over head are not the same gulls as my grandfather might have known, but they cry with the same hunger and needs, and I feel it in my bones because I cry inside for the same things they do, for comfort and satisfaction.

Sometimes I sit here and pretend I am Wordsworth, or some other natural poet seeking to preserve all that I see each day when I come here as if it is as important as the stuffy stuff that gets recorded in history books, the changing of leaves, the color of water, the dribble of rain or fleck of snow, on me, on the leaves, or the fallen leaves, on the surface that sometimes glittered with light and sometimes is so dark I could feel it suck me into its depths.

I come to water like this for rebirth, to shed not possessions that I fear to carry elsewhere, but the internal possession I have collected and cannot simply dump in the trash, not memories, but a parcel of feelings that have weighed me down more firmly than years living in one place, filled with guilt of mistakes I’ve made or things I have not done or will never do, and that other stuff such as words I should have said, but missed my opportunity, words like love or adoration that have such a short life span that unless you cast them into the wind they evaporate and leave only ashes in your hand and this weight like a stone inside you that you can’t just cast away – except in places like this where the world welcomes you, and draws these things out, and leaves to wander off with much less heaviness so that you can return to your life as if you have just come back from a place full of palm trees and have washed your feet in distant exotic oceans you cannot reach for economic or other reasons.

It is all here, lapping at the shore with lazy brown waves that are stirred up by the rise of a flock of geese or some kid throwing stones into the middle from the top of the bridge – kids like I used to be, escaping disaster to find salvation here.

Flush days

May 28, 1980

“It’s nice the see this place in day light,” Ben says as he puffs his pipe.

He means of course bright light rather than the dim place this river had been for months, a dried up, dismal landscape that had seemed more like the surface of the moon than a place of flowing water – drought exposing its ribs so as to look like a starving version of the man William Carlos Williams claimed he could see in the Great Falls downtown.

In spring, when wet, this place comes alive, and upstream – maybe as far west as the mythical Lake Passaic – April had indeed brought showers so we could see May flowers popping up around here.

I remember my first time coming here with my grandfather and how amazed I was by what I saw, not the Great Falls here, but a tiny eight or ten foot variety that made me claim it as my own, with white water tumbling over it down onto the flat surface filled with stones below – and moving fast again towards the arches of the Outwater Lane Bridge down stream, a twisting current that made me think of it as a silver serpent and still does.

My boyhood imagination, along with the nasty tales Leonard Suresky told about the river made me actually believe real monsters lived among the trees or in the deeper water, so that I gripped my grandfather’s hands until my knuckles turned white.

But if there is a beast here, it is in the flow of water and how it beats the shores with both fists when it is in full bloom, as it is now, a lush, flush powerful water that sometimes – if the sun is right – looks green, reflecting the trees that are only just beginning to blossom as well. My favorite trees, the mulberries, just showing off their new green dress, while my second favorite tree, the willows, barely turn green at all, or a variety that seem godlike and golden, even before autumn turns their leaves to bright yellow.

Geese and duck float now over places they waddled only a few months ago, looking cleaner than they did, though the water hides their legs and washes away the mud from their feathers. They dip their beaks into the surface and come up with silver fish they had to dig in mud before to get.

But they are still restless, wondering when exactly the good times will end and force them back into old nasty habits they only reluctantly take on. Survival is a mean mistress that makes us all do things we might be shamed of in better times.

For a short time many years ago, I lived homeless on the streets, begging for coins and feeding off the kindness of a donut maker who gave me the stale end of the day remains. I still hate lemon-filled donuts on that account.

I laugh at Ben, and tell him beauty is a thin veneer, and beneath its surface lurks dangers unseen, claws that will rip a man to pieces if he makes the wrong move. Even the water is not innocent, and I recall two boys who drowned in the puffed up water when it first came, kids, who like me at their age, presumed they could handle nature and assumed the landscape would remain unchanged, and did not account for the deeper water when they waded out into it.

When Dave and I came here, we survived by luck, making the same mistakes those kids made but somehow saved from the worst. We were even more foolish, looking for the big dangers that did not exist, like wild wolves, while failing to see until almost too late, this loose bit of stone or the glass over which our bare feet walked, mistaking sometimes the broken pieces of soda bottles for jewels some imaginary pirate left – or the pearls my grandfather once told me actually could be found here in oysters the size of dinner plates.

We found no treasure – or at least not the kind we could bring to the bank.

But I still come here, searching not for fortune, but for peace, and strangely in the midst of seasons, be they flush or not, I find it, and so does Ben between each puff of his pipe.