Editor’s note: This commentary is by Walt Amses, a writer who lives in North Calais.
While consolidating a number of moldy cardboard boxes of notebooks, journals and clippings into a more concise version of my often inarticulate, sometimes incomprehensible etchings over the last five decades, I discovered an archive of sorts. I knew the stuff existed but just how much of it there was and the different forms it took surprised me: prose to poetry; single words and sentence fragments — a dizzying chronicle, ranging from military service to college to retirement and everything in between.
A simple logistical problem — moving the whole mess into a protective plastic tub — hit a speed bump when I began reading, perpetuating an hour’s work into several days of dipping into the past: My wife and I and two little boys on a sun-kissed Cape cod beach; hiking through a Fourth of July snow squall over Logan Pass in Glacier National Park; landing a nearly 6-pound brown trout on a crystal-clear New Zealand river; snowshoeing through the woods half a mile from the house, bewitched by unseen, gurgling ravens.
Memories crackled like live wires — some happy, even joyous; others heartbreaking at the time but less so now, courtesy of time and distance. A certain portion expressed bewilderment, lost at various moments in various situations.
Because of the timing — a December over 40 years ago — one especially struck me. It seemed strange even then, but it’s since taken on an otherworldly quality, connected to the present and this strangest of holiday seasons. Do things right, and you’re lonely to the point of alienation. Holidays can be a petri dish of lonely, even in a crowd, and it’s not necessarily a new thing.
It was Christmas Eve in the mid-1970s. I was languishing between college and the first tentative steps toward real life. After feasting on shrimp curry-noodle, clams in black bean sauce and the legendary chow fun at Lin’s Garden — cheap, good, open 24/7 and long gone but fondly remembered — several of us drifted north, through Little Italy to a Soho bar long before the neighborhood became a destination.
Vaguely etched in memory like so many nights back then, steeped in a readily available buffet of intoxicants, dulling inhibition as well as recollection, this evening — inhabited by close friends, friends of friends and even acquaintances of acquaintances — remains memorable for a weirdness all its own. We weren’t necessarily close, but found ourselves together this one night for reasons that I don’t readily recall
It was years before the “Soho” of Prada, Louis Vuitton and Gucci; before the swells and speculators drove the artists out; and well before the bar — Fanelli’s Cafe at the intersection of Prince and Mercer — became a New York City landmark itself for simply resisting the lucrative gentrification going on around it.
What we had in common apart from simply knowing each other was that we all seemed to be stuck somewhere in between, our lives in a holding pattern, journeys yet to begin. I drove a truck at the time, delivering lumber and building materials, content with minimal interaction, mostly variations of “put it over there.” I was in a relationship that my girlfriend and I agreed was essentially over, but neither could afford to move out of the apartment. Stressful doesn’t begin describing the atmosphere we shared.
That Christmas Eve, we closed the lumberyard at noon, not because my boss had any reverence for the holiday but rather that his customers might. Consequently, his aversion to paying staff without the justification of profit ruled the day.
When he reminded me that it was business as usual 7:30 a.m. on the 26th, I felt like Bob Cratchit. Walking the long mile home through the large park overlooking Newark Bay — the car was hers — I occupied a bench awhile, trying to think smart, instead staring myopically down a hill toward the panorama of athletic fields I’d played on since I was a kid. The cold eventually interceded in my highlight reel, heading me toward the fourth-floor walkup I would need to vacate within a month.
Later, in the warm, amber glow of Fanelli’s, with its wall of weathered, black-and-white boxing photographs — the owner was a fighter in the 1920s — and a smattering of holiday lights, the conversation flowed along with the beer. We never discussed how we all wound up there on Christmas Eve but my notebook suggests we’d unwittingly formed a kind of community, temporary though it was, providing each of us with the companionship we seemed to need.
We talked late into the night, outlasting the ebb and flow of several distinct crowds coming and going — blue-collar neighborhood regulars, couples sipping wine at the tiny tables along the wall, and finally paint-flecked artists in for a nightcap. Unlike our small coterie, everyone appeared heading someplace else — holiday parties, family gatherings; who knew? Even though it was New York and the possibilities endless, the long mahogany bar was our only destination. I don’t recall anyone bringing up Christmas, although I do remember wondering why. I never broached the topic either.
As we filed out into the misty, chilly night, heading different directions home, there was a friendly challenge, an inebriated footrace over glistening cobblestones, deep in a metal canyon once known as the “Cast Iron District,” a less-than-shocking stumble, a fractured wrist and the last hearty laugh of the long evening. A couple of the guys and I have remained lifelong friends, meeting up whenever we can but never in Soho. That New York isn’t what it used to be and neither are we.
In hindsight, that Christmas Eve was an aberration, a moment in time, a grainy old photograph. A memory resurrected in the wrinkled pages of a moldering notebook, documenting a time, a place, and a small group of people whose paths incidentally crossed that night.
Although inconsequential as it occurred, it takes on significance in our year of living on the edge. Though it was unremarkably random, random is no longer part of our repertoire — it’s too dangerous. It’s become another one of those simple things we miss so much.
