Gray World

May 25, 1980

It is a grey world, touched up by the grey fluff in the sky. Water, once blue and green and gold, now harmonizes with the restricted hues, with only a touch of brown and dark, dismal green for variety, reflected at the shore.
The day suggests rain, but the air denies it, with clouds too thin to sustain such an embrace.
Even the factory smoke stacks looked paler, their brick faces like washed out water colors, bleeding at the edges as they billow white, like dull flames caught in thickening ash, soon to die.
A black bird -- a crackle or a crow -- flaps its way to the water's edge in a clumsy landing, snapping at the vines before being startled by the 8 o'clock whistle, a whistle that moans across the water like some monster from the deep, wounded in some previous scene and coming finally to eke revenge.
Then, both moan and bird vanished, leaving only the sound of the river water gushed over the man made falls, the brown foam forming at the bottle and spreading among the reddish rock, the bubble and pop telling secrets of where the water has been in its long travel from Lake Passaic.
The stench tells more, of entrances and exits in and out of dark factories, the Little Falls Laundry, Marcal, Garden State Paper, and then that, too, fades.

Passaic River: Written in Concrete

Sunlight flickers off the crests of waves creating tiny crowns as the water gurgles through the rocks from the falls, white heads among the gray stones and concrete blocks and protruding pipes contractors dumped here over night, one more unexpected change to the landscape I had not expected.
On these days, I have become a quality control inspector, studying the details of the river to make sure no one has misappropiately used nature, and here, one more abuse appears in this so-called age of environmental enlightenment, shards of concrete laid down on the river bottom like too many chocolate chips stuffed into this moving brown cookie.
From here on the dock or from above the falls, I have contantly admired the texture of the land below the falls, where the stony bottom forces the surging water to spread out and seek avenues unimagined before, where trees root right in the middle of the water anchored by the stones. I have always found a symitry in that jumble, shaping patterns of behavior for the water and the wildlife that have settled around it, red-wing black birds, wrens, even occassional egrets setting up shop at convenient locations, dipping their beaks in the water as the fish swim by.
These newly deposited retangular objects have no place in that world, already drawing pieces jetsum that would have passed through at other times, fallen branches suddenly tangled in the narrow passages, causing more things to clutter behind them, and then eventually the water to back up. While the water will never get so deep as to swallow the falls, the pattern has altered and the foot holds birds used have vanished, leaving many winging over the top, settling on the too-high perches to work out the details of these new horrors.
Stealthly, the river rats work their way out, finding this more condusive to their way of life, giving them new angles behind which to hide. Even the muscrats make their move, stirring from under their reed protection to peer out, as perplexed as the birds.
Over time, life will work around the intrusion, the birds will find some new way to use these as they had used the stones. Even the water will eventually make smooth the hard edges, sculpting the odd shapes into smoother, more acceptable images. Yet, something fundamental has altered. The tree-filled, stone-cluttered world of yesterday has vanished, and even time, chiseling at the concrete, can never bring that place back.

Dream Bridge: Passaic River

It took them two years to rebuild the bridge between here and Garfield, the roadway ripped up to its ribs, rusting steel with nothing but brown surging water beneath, our side bequeathed the rates and roaches and junk cars, with factories sprewing green liquid down into the water from concrete pipes, while dead fish float at the bridge's feet, low water showing its roots like rotting teeth-- a few web-backed carp struggling at the foot of reeds, scavaging the remains of their breathern, bones of both rising with the morning froth as barefooted children wade across in their rush to school.

Passaic River Drought -- 1980-81

Even the gulls cry for water, though none can read the newspaper headlines declaring this the worse draught in twenty years. I lived in Paterson when the last spell hit, and remembered hovering over the Passaic River then where the West Broadway bridge crossed up into the Haledon hills, the shrunken banks of the country's first industrial city smeared below with soil so black it looked like tar. That spell lasted from Kennedy's election as president to Nixon's loss for Governor of California two years later.
Now, hot dry September follows a hot dry August, the brutal sun beating the river bottom hard, leaving cracks in the soil the way a car crash might rip open highway ashpalt. The old fishermen line up along the stony sides lines drooped into the remaining puddles.
"It's not as bad as the dust bowl thirties," one old man tells me, who was old enough and well-traveled enough to know and remember. "But it's bad enough."
The river looks like an open wound in the flesh of the earth, leaving the green on either side to wither and die, while gulls, wrens, robins and sparrows peck at seed in the muddy corners.
I watch the old men swaying, back and forth, trying to coax a bite on bait as dead as the fish likely are, cringing under the steady soot of illegal factory smoke, avoiding those places where the drip, drip, drip of chemicals falls from equally illegal drainage pipes, the earth there a toxic zone that even the wild dogs avoid.
And me, I sit near the spot where my old raft once sunk, seeing its rotted edges for the first time since I was a child.

Passaic River Diary: April 4, 1981

April 4, 1981

The buds start again – round bulbs of green illuminating the banks and the long branches with their soft array.
The birds chatter over the gentle roar of the falls near the foot of Service Diner, wind causing last year’s brown least to clatter along the ground like scurrying crabs.
The new season grows around us bit by bit, filling in the blank spaces, cyhasing away winter’s dismal brown – though I can still feel the chill of the water and the resistance of winter to vacate.
But this is not yet May when these banks will fill in with an almost impenetrable green that even the rumble of traffic from River Road and the Outwater Lane Bridge cannot dent, green that will hide the soot-stained brick walls of the old paper mills, green that casts deep shadows over the abandoned car lots and even moderates the stench of the still-operating gas station that pumps life into cars and fumes into the atmosphere.
I ache for the warm innocence of the water, the safe heat of sunlight that brings the carp back to the surface where I might see their webbed backs.
Spring has teased me a few times this winter, not with splotches of green, but with fair days too early to make sense, comfortable days that confused the wildlife into believing the seasons might be changing when they were not: sea gulls crying forlornly over the river top after fish they can’t find, ducks and geese seeking mates who have not yet arrived from the south – only for winter to plunge us back into cold, casting a net of thin ice over the shallow eddies nearer the shores.
We did not get the deep freeze we have seen in the past, none of the blocks of ice piling one on top of another to resemble a collection of children’s toys.
Somewhere – perhaps down by the new Wall Street Bridge – church bells chime, as if to celebrate the coming of the new season. But I know it probably the conclusion of some funeral, and serves more to mourn the passing of an old friend. I mourn, too, even if for an old friend as mean-spirited as winter.
Yet for all that, I know how quickly time passes along these shores and how spring will bleed into summer and summer into fall, and too soon winter will rise with its deathly look, and that the green that I love now, will die a spectacular death in red and gold, and then turn brown again.

Glass Fish

04/01/80

The river water flaps sluggishly against the posts, rare, clean, see-through water in the country's most polluted river, glistening as if covered with jewels in the sun.
The rain and wind from last night's storm pushed and pulled at the sand here, leaving streaks across its surface that from a distance look like the petals of a large flower.
The tides have calmed overnight in me and the river.
I am left with the guilt of having used my poetry badly, as a weapon to hurt someone again.
I vowed once never to do it again after a scene in a bar with one of the bitches, who thought I loved her when I found her deplorable, me unable to handle the barfly mentality.
When I handed her the poem, she thought I was handing her a complement, and rushed out of the bar after she read it.
And now, I've done it again, to someone far less deserving, and some for whom I did care.
I have not learned the art of human relations; perhaps I never will.
I keep getting boggled down with the concept of truth. What it is made up of. How it must be shaped.
This time I gave the poem to Kathy, the girl who tried to kill herself after her affair with Franz, Terry and others on campus.
I keep thinking of the old oriental proverb, the one which says that if you save a life, you are responsible for it.
Yet, too many times of late my kindness has been mistaken for affection, and my caring mistaken for love. This is a fragile world with glass fish swimming. And though I can see their struggle, I cannot see mine. They seem transparent and without substance, while I see myself as firm.
Perhaps I am the one who is transparent and not them, making my noble search for truth less viable.
Perhaps, standing here beside the river, I only think I see the bottom, when I do not.

A big foot print

Big Pete and Rich Sarti

Friday, March 02, 2012

Teddy was wrong when he told me ten years ago at my mother’s funeral that we were the last two of the Sarti clan.
I was wrong for thinking when Ted died in 2010 that I was the last.
But now I am truly the last of the clan now that Uncle Pete (Big Pete) is gone.
He died Monday of complications from cancer – a cancer that should have killed him in the late 1990s, when doctors predicted he had only a few months to live.
He fooled them, he lived another dozen years.
Big Pete wasn’t really a Sarti. But he married so early into the clan he might as well have been the sixth son my grandfather never had, marrying Alice who was special to all of us.
His house became a center of family social activities, especially after my grandfather passed away in 1966. But he had already become deeply enmeshed in family functions from when he married Alice in 1958 when my grandfather’s house was the center of the Sarti world.
Big Pete was part of that 1950s vision of a bright new modern world and seemed to get his fingers around the bottom rung of success in a way none of the others of my family ever could, someone who lived out the full potential the post war America offered.
A first generation Italian immigrant, Pet came to America as an infant as his family settled into the Bronx. After meeting and marrying Alice, he settled into the second floor apartment of a two-family house off Valley Road in Clifton, where Alice gave birth to Little Peter and John, the first of their four children.
By the time Alice was ready to deliver their third child – Lisa – Peter was successful enough to afford their own house in Fairfield, where they and most of their relations from the Bronx moved, kids from a host of families charging across otherwise peaceful streets carrying trays of food.
I didn’t know until last night that Big Pete met my aunt, Alice at Curtis Wright in Lodi, where both of them worked at the time. He was working for a department that was about to be eliminated, while she worked as secretary to the boss.
Little Peter at the wake laughed about the meeting, saying that the boss did not want to upset Alice, so instead of laying Big Pete off as originally planned, the boss offered Pete a position in another department where he would work with computers.The boss didn’t want to hurt Alice by firing her boyfriend, Little Peter said.
The transfer put Big Pete on the road to success.
Like Michael Bloomberg, Peter would be learning to work with computers in the mid-1950s decades before computer technology became common item, and he would transfer those skills to Wall Street where he would rise in status to executive vice president of Kidder Peabody & Co. Inc. – though unlike Bloomberg, Pete never lost touch with his humanity or his dedication to family.
I once compared Pete and Alice to the characters in the Dick Van Dyke Show, living in a world that was then an exact picture of the American Dream.
Last night at the funeral home with the hundreds of people coming into to pay tribute to Big Pete, I was reminded of Alice’s funeral and the line of cards that stretched behind the hearse as it made its way from the Fairfield church to the Paterson grave yard – today, I saw a repeat of that, a stunning ride that had police cars holding up traffic as if we were part of a presidential motorcade.
Little Pete at the wake said his father had left “a big footprint,” a phrase he would use again today at the church.
He said his father had had numerous brushes with death over his 80-year life sp, staring back when as a very young boy, he fell off a hay wagon he wasn’t supposed to be on, and did not tell anyone until an infection settled into his ear and took him years to recover.
Raised in the Bronx, Big Pete visited the zoon and played in the neighborhood with his kin, a scene duplicated in the next generation when the family moved to Fairfield.
“It was as if our family had taken over Fairfield,” Little Pete said.
Once successful, Big Pete purchased a shore house down in Long Branch where the family routinely spent their summers.
Big Pete’s granddaughter said he loved listening to Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, smoking cigars and sitting on the beach looking out at the sat.
But he also rode a bicycle and had a nasty habit of falling off. One time, he ran into a car door that was flung open in front of him. Little Pete got a call from Big Pete who said, “We got a problem,” a standard phase for when one of his schemes when haywire.
His granddaughter said Big Pete was completely honest, and recalled her efforts to learn how to cook. She said she liked his honesty because when he gave praise he really meant it.
One of the elderly priests at the funeral recalled the day Big Pete told him he was leaving the seminary – one of those life decisions that led eventually to his marrying my aunt, a kind of marriage that seems as mythical to me as a tale from King Arthur’s Court.
Little Peter said a lot of dogs passed through Big Pete’s life, all of them with the same name, “King.”
Another priest, who became a close friend of Big Pete’s , recalled when Big Pete and the kids took him into their home. This was after Big Pete’s mistaken second marriage, when his four kids from Alice, moved out and into a house on Hollywood Avenue, followed by Big Pete a short time later.
I briefly visited them at that house, hearing their tale of woe, heard that the priest was living there, but never met him.
The priest, however, recalled Pete’s rituals, putting on the coffee in the morning, getting the kids ready for school, before making his way to Jersey City and the search for a parking spot.
His granddaughter recalled a regular routine called “bagels and buns” and the trip to the store during which Big Pete sat one of them in his lap and let them steer. When they passed a police car, she was sure they would get pulled over, but Big Pete only laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it.”
Big Pet worried about very little, even though other people might have seen the pain his life – the loss of Alice in 1975, the pain he suffered from cancer. But he always helped people where he could, and according to Little Peter, left a foot print as big as his name.
The elderly priest remembered when he took his sister to Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for treatment and while there heard Big Pete’s name called out, finding a frail version of the Pete he’d known.
“Six months ago, my sister died,” the priest said. “Now Pete is gone.”
But Little Peter said Pete’s legacy was in the people he left behind, his family and friends. He recalled Big Pete taking him to the office from time to time, but only realized later how the people in the office were like a second family to him, some of whom had come to the wake or the funeral.
Little Pete also recalled his father’s legendary pocket games with men from the neighborhood full of cigar smoke and healthy conversations. Now Little Pete continued those poker games with the sons of some of the same men his father had played with.
Big Pete’s granddaughter choked up before she could finish her tribute, which in that emotional moment was a tribute bigger than words, big enough even for Big Pete.
As I drove behind the hearse along the highway, as the police made way for us to pull into the cemetery where Big Pete would be reunited with Alice, the love of his life, I realized that nearly everybody who had ever helped me as a young boy were living in that same grave stone resort, people of the Sarti clan that had stepped up to the plate to help fill the space left by my lack of father, each taking their turn with me, each become a father for me, and in that role, Big Pete certainly played his part, and though I didn’t see him often, I had to see him at the last, to say good bye to a man whose life was bigger than life, and yet at the same time, never out of touch with the ordinary, small things having great meaning, his footprint big indeed, especially in my heart.