HOLY THURSDAY

The decisive events happened during the evening. Those who recorded it (The Evangelists) did so with a wealth of detail and striking similarities. All four seem driven to put down everything they know and everything they can remember, hour by hour, minute by minute.

Moses instituted The Passover (then as now underway in Jerusalem on that original night and among our Jewish brethren). Successive Bible-based film epics have depicted how Jewish doorways marked with the blood of the lamb are spared The Angel of Death and about the feast of lamb, unleavened bread and bitter herbs — not that I can claim to be familiar with those passages in Salvation History as recorded in the Old Testament. I saw it at the movies, then read it in The Book.

There are conflicting early Church accounts of the exact day on which the Apostles’ and Jesus’s feast took place. St. John plainly says that the day of Christ’s death. The other Evangelists say it was the fourteenth day of Nisan (the first month of the Hebrew calendar) and that Jesus died on Friday the Fifteenth. According to the fourth Gospel (John’s), the supper took place on the thirteenth and the crucifixion on the fourteenth. Days reckoned from midnight versus days reckoned from sunset (as they were by Jews of that era) might account for some of the discrepancies.

Scripture is full of such discrepancies, we are reminded by my primary source, being French historian Henri Deniel-Rops (1901-1965), who, as a Catholic-turned-Agnostic-turned Catholic, who had long questioned whether Christianity had any relevance or force in an increasingly mechanized and industrialized world in which so many putative Christians seemed indifferent to the sufferings of those around them. He’d come to experience a world capable of two world-consuming wars. He’d seen Marxism or various iterations of socialism (right in the German Third Reich, left in the Soviet Union) claim to restore national and spiritual meaning to the human order. He’d seen them dissolve into a rivers of blood.

But the bloody events following upon the breaking of bread on that long-ago Passover eve seemed to promise ultimate deliverance from ourselves — to (as Daniel-Rops puts it) “break the shell of pride and envy, the matrix of the human creature, which stifles even the best of us.”

Thus night fell on the Upper Room. The little clay lamps had been lighted in their candelabras.

It was the night of Judas. Most of us know the story.

I’ll head out to a service this evening — an ancient commemoration, reminding us, though amid much ceremony and beauty, that there’s a little Judas in all of us, but that repentence and deliverance are available to all of us, as it was to that errant apostle who despaired of forgiveness and did himself in.

And then, there is the bread.

I turn to a favorite German-born theologian with an Italian name, Romano Guardini (1885-1968), to clarify the meaning in that bread shared at that particular feast of parting on that first Holy Thursday night.

Guardini, in his book The Lord, writes that…

What Jesus passes on to them (the Apostles) is no longer mere pieces of unleavened Easter bread or the sacred drink-offering of the Pasch, but the mystery of the New Covenant just established. And all that takes place is not only the celebration of one high, fleeting hour; it is a sacred rite instituted for all time and constantly to be renewed until God’s kingdom comes and the Lord Himself celebrates it again with His own in the unveiled glory of the new creation.

Mysterium Fedei: The mystery of faith. I hear that phrase at every consecration of bread at every mass I attend.

It all goes back to that first Holy Thurday.

And to think I’m about to go out to pick up — a pizza! We’ll call that Bread of the World, Anno Domini 2026.

I’ll partake of the other Bread, the Eucharist, hours later, hopefully in the right state of mind and soul.

It can make you sad to think what followed that Upper Room meal — that year and every year thereafter, including this year, to this very hour. Judis always slipping off into the shadows.

Anxious, faith often faltering like a guttering candle, I try to stay by Him, and take what He offers me. I can’t say I always deserve it, or always succeed.

I go for pizza. Thereafer, for the real Feast.

ON THE BACK PORCH AND …”IN EDEN GARDEN”AS SPRING ARRIVES ONCE AGAIN AT THE LAST MILE

Spring, or nearly spring. Nearly Easter. Nearly the Holy Season. Once again.

I popped into The Last Mile mainly to say hello to Deano at the bar. It was nearly 5 p.m. today. There was a scattering of people at the tables, oddly no one I knew. But Deano informed me that PipPa Goldflower was having drinks on Knox the artist’s back porch upstairs. You get there through a side door and up a stairway off the side street. Knox’s door was open and I could see through his cramped dining area — full of leaning, half-finshed canvases and other junk — that he was, in deed, out there on his back porch with Pippa. I joined them. They gave me welcoming hellos. Pippa was in a long shift, florid, almost tropical (for spring, I presume). Knox was in jeans and a black shirt open at the neck, having a kind of priestly air — the black highlighting his gray, trimmed beard. They sat in cheap folding chairs I’m sure Knox picked up at Walmart.There was one more leaning against the wall and I took it. Down below were remnants of the winter’s fierce, unending snowfalls. It had been some winter. Of course, this being New England, it isn’t necessariliy over yet. But, spring seemed to be approaching at last… the temperature, the extra daylight, a certain smell of vegitation as it emerged from the ice and snow….

Also down below in the dirt lot that was parking for Knox, Deano and whoever worked at The Mile (everybody else parked on the street). It’s also where Joe Barron, owner of The Last Mile, held an occasional outing. Knox’s old 1994 Volvo was down there pulled up against the lone tree. That car barely hangs together to get him around (for those trips to Walmart, etc.) . It is burgundy red. Out ahead were the trees and the rooftops of the neighborhood and Knox had always hope he could get a peek through those roofs and trees at the blue ocean at Revere Beach. He claims you can do that when things line up (like he’s saying the trees and rooftops move aside for him???Maybe after a couple of Blushing Monks). Dean says in winter, when the trees are bare, you can see the ocean from the roof of the building. I haven’t been up on the roof. Maybe someday. Maybe not. (Maybe someday Joe Barron will stage a party up there. Oh, how dangerous!)

“So, a little change in the weather,” said Pippa. She had turquoise beads and a pendant hanging down over her shift. Her hair is dyed a kind of maize color and was pulled back behind her ears and flowed down her back. She has a wonderful smile that illuiminates a face that has been Botoxed to a vinyl-like smoothness. I could only guess at Pippa’s age — and I won’t. She’s an attractive women, will never age.

I thought these two might make lovers someday — but, no. Just friends. Good friends. Loyal patrons of the world of The Last Mile that Knox had graced with his mural art, making the place — from time to time –attractive to, believe it or not, tourists who happen to consult a guide to local “interesting” joints.

“The snow was eye-high out there,” Knox said. And right now, the air was mild enough for us to be sitting outside without jackets. The occasional breeze reminded us that that could change as the sunlight drifted west. Perhaps that breeze came from the ocean Knox hoped to see — like Balboa when he found the Pacific. Knox would discover the Atlantic.

“The war is driving me nuts,” Pippa said. I didn’t want to bring up the war. Who can do anything about the war who hangs around The Last Mile?

“All this reminds me of favorite poems,” said Knox, shifting quickly away from war.

Of course it did — whatever “all this” was — and something was always reminding Knox of poetry. He named the poems. Things by Keats, Shelley, Byron. Knox is a romantic.

“The world gets renewed by art and poetry,” he said.

“So, renew us,” I said. What he proceeded to give us wasn’t one of the Romantics. Even I, the old English major, knew that. But I thought I recognized it.

In Just-spring when the world is mudlicious, the little lame balloon man whistles far and wee…

That was how the poem went, spilling out in Knox’s deep baratone. He recited the whole thing from memory. It was by e.e. cummings. I did recognize it — Strang little thing, but nice. Yes, I liked it. I know e.e. cummings. He’s fun. He’s good for spring.

“I know the others,” Pippa said. “I know what you’re going to give us. Cummings is your only modern guy. Next you’ll recite some Romantics. Try to impress us with your memory.”

Knox laughed.

“But let me get one in there edgewise, if I may, “Pippa said.

I knew Pippa liked Edna St. Vincent Millay. How did I know that? Well, this sort of thing — these quirky patrons of the Mile sitting around, musing –had happened one day last spring when it was still chilly out and Knox and Pippa and some guy she’d linked up with, an arty type, were sitting around a table and Knox had his Blushing Monk in front of him. (This day, up there on his porch, he and Pippa just had half-drunk cups of coffee.)

“So, what have you got for us, Pip?” I said.

Nothing is so beautiful as spring,” she said. That was the beginning of her poem. It wasn’t her lady Edna S.V.M. It was someone and something else. A strange little poem, which continued…into spring…

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         

   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

No, she hadn’t memorized that. She was reading off her iPhone. But that was quite some poem.

“Gerard Manley Hopkins,” she said.

“Ah, the old Jesuit,” I said. “Sprung rhythm,” I added, summoning a memory of English class.

“There’s more,” she said.

“Well, by all means, let’s hear it,” said. Knox.

And we did, in Pippa’s velvet voice. (I believe she been on the stage at one time.)

What is all this juice and all this joy?  she said, reading.

Juice. Joy. Yeah, That sounded like Hopkins. Really — evocative, the way he writes. Odd rhythms. Odd diction. (I was really channeling Literature 101 now.)

Pipa went on…        

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         

   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         

   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.    

Wild, wierd stuff,” said Knox.

“Not unlike your paintings,” said Pippa.

“I liked it,” I said while Knox was still laughing. “I like Hopkins. It’s religious, of course. He was a priest, after all.”

“Religion, poetry–we’ve had it all out here,” Knox said, sipping his cooling coffee –which, I’d wager, had a drop of brandy in it. “I’d call it sufficient. Enough! Enough with words! Words, words, words….

Now,” he said, stood, plainly a little stiff from sitting — and a little “juiced”, though he’d greatly moderated lately. He went to the porch rail which I hoped could take his leaning weight, ” let me see if, just for once, I can see the sea out there.”He stared, in silence — as if “on a peak in Darian.” (I was channeling poetry now, too. Channeling Keats. Phrases popping into mind.

“Yes! I see it,” Knox said exuberently. He meant the ocean.

I’m sure he did. I’m sure at that point, old Knox, flush with springtime and in the presence of Pippa his warmest inspiration, his “juices and joys” flowing — I’ll bet he could see all the way to England.

And if we stayed out there long enough, he’d be seeing all the way to the moon.

Yes, there were more poems.  And some repeats, the world down below us, the mudlicious, the little lame balloon man’s whistles far and wee… (Pippa said she could hear it on some nearby street) … We were with old G.M. Hopkins …In Eden garden.

I stayed with them until the early spring dusk set in.

ST. PATRICK’S DAY WE’LL ONCE AGAIN BE WALKING THE GREEN MILE AT THE LAST MILE LOUNGE

Soon it will be St. Patrick’s Day and there will be the usual little buffet with chafing dishes on card tables at the back of the room at The Last Mile Lounge — and a green laurels over the bar back mirror, carefully put in place by Deano who claims multi-racial lineage. Corned beef and cabbage will be served. There’s usually a turnout of all-season, all feast regulars, and loyal once-a-year regulars. Parades up the TV….a fair amount of song from the first or second generation sons of Erin who inividually pop in for a “pint” now and and then, but, as I say, the regulars and the now-and-thens mingle happily festooned in green. Some will come early, but most will converge, in keeping with tradition, at noon on The Day.

You could expect to see Terry “Tarps” Walsh (an old fellow house painter with Stickey Sammartino who sees to it Columbus Day is a big deal at The Mile –and wouldn’t miss joining his old friend “Tarps” in an Italo-American version of “The Wild Colonial Boy” on St. Patrick’s Day.)

And for all events that afternoon, for all purposes, there will Paulie O’Brien, Paddy Byrne, Jo-Jo Sullivan, “Tiny “Mullen (who tips the scale at about three hundred pounds), Joe “Red O’Hara ( a name that for me evokes the memory of my late brother-in-law of the same name, hair color and complexion), Dennis Patrice (the only Haitian-Irish American I know), Emmanuel “Manny” Fitzgerald, who is African-American but always turns out in homage to that Irishman somewhere in his family tree, be he slave-holder or liberator), Mickey Fahey, “Mutt” Kelly, Jeff Roach, Dave O’Connor, Pete O’Connell, “Sniffles” McHoole, Declan McNamara and each will bring a wife or girlfriend, though there will be some stags.

it should be crowded, given that The Mile consists of very modest floor space.

And the Reverend Gene Rooney will come to provide a blessing and a poem or two — and to remind everyone that the day is a celebration of an Irish saint who, against great odds and amid enormous hardship, converted the craggy, pagan peoples of the Emerald Isle to the faith and that the faith lingers, though severely challenges in that land now, as Fr. Rooney, a native of Limerick, will remind everyone. (He is, otherwise, a parochial vicar at some tony suburban church but grew up , after his childhood emigration with his parents to the hard scrabble neighborhoods of Lynn.

So there will be prayers and songs — and “Tarps” Walsh’s augmented version of the traditonal Irish prayer (i.e., “May the road rise up to meet you, may the rain fall soft upon your fields, etc…), and Paddy Byrne will, as always, predictably declare, “was that what happened to me the other night !?– I thought I fell on my face, but it was the road that rose up to meet me!”

And “Tarp’s prayer (I said it was “augmented” — or, at least, extended, or desccralized from its ancient tradition, as it often is in barroms from South Boston to Block Island:

Tarps will stand in the middle of the room and intone,” for ALL of you sons of Ireland and your guests — my prayer is that your souls be in heaven at least twenty-four hours before the Devil even knows your dead.”

Amen.

CRUMBS

The wall clock gongs inacurately. It might give you two gongs for seven o’clock. It just, at eight o’clock (which it is, or was a second or two, or three ago) gonged out the Westminster chime as a prelude, as it always does, but gave no gongs for eight o’clock.

It can’t be fixed. A clock repair person told me that.

But it’s a nice clock, so it will stay there on the wall, irrespective of innacurate –or no — gongs to count out the hour.

Who needs to be reminded of passing hours, of passing time? This clock doesn’t tick, either, like many old clocks.

Tick, tick, tick, tick….

No. Utterly silent.

But just hearing the Westminster chimes, as if in some beautiful sqaure in sunlight or fog, in London, or New York, or Boston, is enough — imagining time stopped eternally. This side of time is the only time we have to worry about time.

In 2023 I did a post, Last Day of February. I’m always conscious, perhaps too conscious, of passing time, of my failure to advance, to finish projects –conscious of getting older. Last night I was thinking how it was the last day of February again. The last hours. Three years later. Not a lot of progress in my life, as I see it. There is much that has been begun, but not finished.

Now it’s March 1st — again.

In 2023, my Last Day of February post began:

The short month. Two months into the new year. The kitchen butcher block rolling table always seems to have crumbs on it. 

Lost time. Nothing left but crumbs.

Time leaves crumbs — crumbs and memories.

I just checked the butcher block table. Still crumbs on it.

I’ll wipe them away.

I’ll keep the memories.

LIFE’S YELLS (TWISTS) AND SHOUTS

There are all kinds of yells and shouts. Happy and sad ones, useful and necessary ones, warning ones.

It didn’t bother me in any way when I heard the guys out back of me briefly this morning find the need to yell. (In fact, I could barely hear this particular yell, or shout; I was just listening in fascination.) It was just one guy, in the course of his work; he was counting — counting, as in– one, two,three….

I’m surmising that he and his co-workers must have been lifting something, or lowering something. The one guy probably needed to yell so the other guys and he would be doing in concert whatever possibly risky task they were executing.

I had let the dog out and was filing the bird feeders. The men were at work beyond the parallell border of white PVC and chain link fencing and masking profusion of Brazilian pepper bushes.

I’ll bet those are hard working guys over there, though I don’t really know what they do. Move big things around., no doubt, laboring on this Thursday morning in some kind of warehouse whose function I’ve not yet — in six-going-on-seven years living here, bothered to ascertain. They ride around in bleating, rattling fork-lifts. It’s one of a million American workplaces where they perform some obscure but necessary function for the rest of us. God bless them.

Three times I heard yelled, “one….two…three….” Three times, something happened.

At the Space Center, when they work to lift off a rocket, they count in reverse….three, two, one….Lift Off!! Maybe they were lowering a rocket out back. Lift… Down!!

Just kidding.

I interviewed the retired editor of the Boston Globe and he recalled how, way back in the old days, a guy in the mailroom of the old Newspaper Row offices and presses announced the first press run of the morning edition by yelling, THEY’RE UP, THEY’RE UP, THEY’RE UP. (I don’t know if anybody was counting the papers as they rolled off. But everybody knew they were coming.

Jack Driscoll (the retired editor) sat in his wheelchair and repeated that memorable shout in the living room of his seaside New Hampshire home. It was almost as if he could hear the presses rumbling again.

I thought of that moment when I read of his death.

One of my earliest memories is a fleeting recollection of being on the streets of Boston’s North End with my parents and we were about to attend my late brother Bill’s graduation ceremonies from Christopher Columbus High School.

There was an Italian guy standing by a pushcart laden with fruit and vegetables and he was shouting.

I didn’t know what to make of it. Why was he shouting, and to whom? Of course, in time I’d know he was selling his produce, shouting for customers. Fresh tomatoes here!!!

My brother Doug worked after high school for the S.D. Warren Paper Company nestled in the heart of the city, very close to Boston’s primarily (in those days) Italian North End. He would come home and say how, every day, he heard some truck driver in the alley below –hear his echoing shout, Hey Wal-YO!”

I would learn from a history professor years later that this means, Hey, boy in Italian. It is apparently a common shouted Italian street greeting. In this case, it was probably coming from some Italo-American driver who made daily deliveries and needed someone to open a loading dock door –someone who knew their Italian. Just a guess.

Or maybe just one Italian fellow was greeting another as their round of daily work began. Shouting that greeting.

I recall being taken to my first-ever professional baseball game by my father. It was a Boston Braves game and there was a guy selling programs and, being very small and impressionable, still ignorant in the ways of theadult world (I was about six years old), I thought the guy was yelling up to the huge painted image of a feathered Indian brave on the stadium wall behind him — as if he expected the brave to answer him.

On November 9, 1957, I was barely eleven and was brought back to the same stadium, which, after the departure of the Braves for, first, Milwaukee, then Atlanta) became Boston University’s football home field . Today it is called Nickerson Field and retains some vestages of the old National League baseball venue, including the right field bleechers.

Of course, the image of the brave is long gone. But it was still on the stadium wall that November day in 1957, greatly faded. He had, in this frozen image, a feather still dangling from his hair and his mouth cupped with his hand — because he is supposed to be shouting, presumably an Indian war chant — just as he had been those four or five years before. Small wonder, in my six-year-old small and wondering mind, the program vendor and the massive Indian brave above and behind him appeared to be shouting to one another. (What could they possibly be saying to one another?)

I recall a letter written by an American soldier from Vietnam, provided me for a story I was preparinig about the soldier and his wartime experiences. He wrote of being wakened from sleep in his tented, temporary billet by someone urgently yelling, MORTAR! MARTAR! and told his father — the recipient of the letter — how he clambored into a fox hole in his underwear, undoubtedly with other soliders, and had to be pulled from the depths of the probably muddy hole when the attack was over. It was not, alas, the final attack he would witness or, ultimately, survive.

I musn’t end that way — in war, in sorrow. I must believe that somewhere now on the planet — probably in many places — someone is shouting for joy.

Beginning in 1961, The Top Notes, the The Isley Brothers, then The Beatles exhorted us, happily, to twist and shout.

And in this primordially, perpetually twisted universe in which we are afflicted by Adam’s fall, we, in great hope — in Matthew 10:27 –are urged to shout from the rooftops the Good News.

So I guess there is good news. I’ll need a ladder to get to the rooftop.

And I hear those fellows over the fence, in shadow and sunlight. They — and I — are counting on it. The Good News, that is.

Maybe they’ve got a ladder I can borrow.

A NORWEGIAN VISITOR TO ‘THE LAST MILE’ RECOUNTS CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF RUSSIAN DARKNESS

She entered quietly on the arm of a periodic visitor to The Mile who lives a block away and occasionally comes in for a hot dog at lunch tme. The neighor’s name is Ingrid and we knew her to be Norwegian-born. The woman, a striking-looking figure with gray hair and sharp, clear features, was named Sigrid. I’d come to find out that she spoke clear, faintly accented English. I knew the neighbor well enough to be greeted by her as they entered and she saw me chatting with Deano at the bar. “Come meet my aunt,” she said.

I sat with them for a full hour, ordered a hamburger at the bar (no table service in The Mile) , and was so glad I’d stopped in and so glad I spent the time — for Sigrid, it turned out, is a very stalwart and healthy and beautiful 90-years-old and, as a small girl, visited all over Europe and Scandanavia and was speaking of her Russian sojourn — of having seen crowds at Lenin’s Tomb. She spoke perfect English though she’s live in Oslo most of the year. She visits her neice, I learned, at least once a year and loves Boston.

“I did not see Lenin’s mummy,” she said of her long-ago Russian journey. “But I saw the queque which stood for hours and waited to get into the mausoleum. And I have seen the Red Square lie as barren as the steppes of Asia when the mausoleum was closed -but along the outskirts of the square the river of people would stream. The side streets poured their tributaries into it, and people walked, walked, walked. I have never been down in the Moscow subway, but a time or two I tried to board with my mother the packed street-cars with people hanging in clusters inside and outside. It would be a hard ride, for at that time, the streets everywhare in Moscow were full of holes and humps, probably heaped and broken by the cold weather such as you here in the United States are having now, and by war.”

“What were you doing in Moscow?” I asked. “The Soviet Union at the time, of course. It could not have been easy to get in and there might have been a fear of getting out.”

“I believe my mother — Ingrid’s grandmother –was on some kind of a misison of charity for her church. She never spoke of the reason for her travel to me, a child, and I, sadly, lacked the curiosity to ask.”

“Was it a secret, why she was there?”

“I don’t believe so,” said Sigred, “but there were a great many secrets in those days in eastern Europe. And I believe the devil had come to visit that region and has never left. And my mother might have feared speaking of it so long as there might be agents, even in Norway. Communist agents, that is.”

A somber remark, to be certain. She went on.

“For a child, there was something hypnotic to finding myself, a child, walking among streams of total strangers in the cold, for it was winter. I have not been a stranger to cold or to winter in my native Norway. But, beyond the weather, there was something cold about the people I saw. My mother spoke to no one, and the faces I saw when I looked up were empty. I was perhaps nine-year-old. I did not see one Russian who smiled, except the attendants on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

“The English word ‘stolid’ might best describe the expressions on the faces of the Russians I encountered. Not ‘solid’ –though they were solid in a way, but ‘stolid.’ And there seemed to be no individual differences in the faces and demeanor. In an American or a Eurpean crowd, one encounters all manner of persons. This has been my experience during a long life. But my childhood impression of the Russians I saw was very bleak–and this was immediately after the end of hostilities in the World War when much of Russia had been ravaged by the German Armies whom Russia and the Allies ultimately defeated and drove off. There was rubble everywhere. But the weight of the dictator and the shadow of Lenin fell once again over the vast Russian territories. For Norway, under the heal of collaborators and for America and the West, victory meant freedom. Not so for the Russians. My mother later told me how she had been told stories of both glory and of wretchedness. But if you wish to know, I believe what my mother ultimately believed was that we were walking in a universe of miserable lies.”

I reminded myself of the definition of “stolid”: unemotional, expressing little or no sensibility.

And then, darkening my mood at this narrative, Sigrid began to speak of what had perhaps most impressed her about the heart of the Soviet Union she experienced with her young senses: it was the unaccountable stench– that made her welcome, on the day she and her mother departed Moscow, the distant rumble of thunder somewhere distant from their hotel room, and the sight and sound of warm summer rain falling on the city of millions and hoping it was washing it clean.

And, as I sat there with aunt and daughter, I thought of the stinking darkness that closed over the vast Russian heartland after 1945 and that has yet to depart entirely, though I have not been there and dare not judge too harshly the Russian soul when we all know there have to be good, brave, noble, pure souls in that nation always longing to be free either to defeat their overlords or to escape, as we may need someday to escaape — if we’re not careful –from our own country. I know how so many feel about the current government. But what of the alternatives to which an alarming number seem drawn.? I can see New Yorkers one day, even in this present day, choosing to flee that grand city by degrees — escaping the slow imposition of a kind of rancid socialist dream that, again, by degrees, might be realized by its handsome, smiling elected acolyte. New Yorkers and, potentially, all of us might come to know what the late Arthur Koestler wrote of in Darkness at Noon.

Far-fetched? Maybe. Maybe not. I leave the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Doestoyevsky and Tolstoy to go on post humously warning us of the horror that crept over their homeland and was hatched out of a Faberge’ egg that was Tzarist Russia, and that finally spilled its yoke out onto the streets in 1917 and that keeps spilling onto all manner of places around the globe, doing horrible things — Vietnam and Cambodia come to mind — and that is constantly seeping into new places, far and near.

Dumb metaphor, I know. But you get the point, I hope.

I thanked Sigrid and Ingrid for that bracing hour of conversation in the cold monthy of February at a little table in the little place called The Last Mile.

BLEAK MID-WINTER SUNG POETRY AWAITING SNOW AT THE LAST MILE

“It’s not mid-winter,” I said to Knox, the artist from upstairs, who’d insisted it was.

“It is,” he insisted, with icy adamance.

“Winter’s just a month old astronomically, ” I said. It’s just a month since the Solstice,” I said. “February, that’s mid-winter.”

“I don’t care what the stars say,” he said. “I’m feeling it here on earth.” But he seemed deflated by my failure to yield on the subject, and so, out of respect, I relented. “Maybe it’s mid-winter in our souls,” I said.

I had to admit, wherever we were in winter, it was feeling — bleak.

Knox was sitting over his Blushing Monk. “Have it your way, Wayland. But I’m feeling — bereft. Christmas came and went. I never got to sing my favorite carol — my MID-WINTER carol. Seriouis people sing it at Christmas, mid-winter or not.”

“So you’re going to sing it?”

“I absolutely am,” Knox said.

How about that! Knox was going to sing — and (a little late) sing a Christmas Carol. All I’d ever heard him sing was “Frosty The Snowman.”

A big bad storm was sweeping across the country. Deano, at the bar, was watching reports on The Weather Channel. It was coming our way. We’d all be isolated. The whole country would feel the sting and white blight of winter, even Dallas. Deano had gotten in extra provisions. There were exactly seven people at four tables, all strangers, none of the regulars, not even Sticky and the Crow. I guess they were somewhere getting ready for the big white freeze. Had the lights dimmed, or was it my imagination? It was quiet. That wasn’t my imagination.

I said to Knox, “you had plenty of time to sing your carol.”

“I’m going to sing it now,” he said. It was written by one of my favorite poets.”

“Who’s that?”

“The lovely, the magnificent Christina Rosetti.”

Christina Rosetti. A Victorian, a famous one, too. 1830 to 1894. Of course I’d read her in English class, not really paying much attention.

“How about that,” I said. And I was recalling that I’d once dated a girl, a very nice, smart girl, who loved the poetry of Christina Rosetti. She wasn’t destined to love me. She sort of gave up quickly on me because of my drinking. Too bad, because we could have read poetry to each other, and sung carols – at least while our time together lasted. At least for a little while. I didn’t feel like we were a forever-together couple. But — well, we were lifting each other up — for a while. As it was, we dated about a month.

“Where is she now?” said Knox, “this old girlfriend of yours?”

“She died,” I said.

Knox grew grim. “Sorry to hear that,” he said.

“It was a long time ago. I was waiting for a landlord to let me into a new apartment in Cambridge,” I said. I was sitting on a little wall, reading a copy of the Boston Globe I’d picked up on the way. I was paging through it, reading as I went, when I came upon the obituaries. And there, right in front of me, was her picture, and the obit telling me she’d gone off to be a college professor in Pennsylvania and died of cancer. She was still young. I hadn’t seen her in years.”

Knox sank, on my behalf, into a vicarious melancholy. Indeed, with that memory, I’d slid down in my chair as well. The memory had blown into the bar out of nowhere, through closed doors, along with the ghost of Christina Rosetti.

Knox, his cocktail of choice, Blushing Monk half gone in front of him (he drank one a day), said, “What’s this about your drinking? You don’t drink.”

“Once upon a time,” I said.

“Fairy Tales begin that way,” he said. “Once upon a time.”

“They don’t always end in Fairyland,” I said.

“Well, I’ve ended here,” he said. “My fairyland.”

I slapped him on the shoulder. “You’ve got miles to go before you sleep,” I said. I was paying tribute to another poem — about a dark, snowy night. “So go ahead. Sing your carol. We’ll have one for my old date, and old Christina, and maybe for the Ghost of Christmas Past —one month past.”

“Yeah, let’s here it, ” a guy chimed in from the next table, like another ghost. Seems like The Mile was full of ghosts that night.

And with that, Knox commenced singing,

In the bleak mid-winter

Frosty wind made moan

Earth stood hard as iron

Water like a stone.

The place went silent, everybody listening. Deano turned down the TV.

Knox has a nice voice, actually. Everybody knew that from him singing “Frosty” at least once every December. He sang on.

Snow had fallen, snow on snow

Snow….. on snow

In the bleak mid-winter

Long ago.

And so the song went. I’d heard it from choir lofts, never from a bearded soloist in a saloon. And it gets religious — it’s a carol, after all, not just a song about winter, like “Slay Ride” or “Jingle Bells” — or “Frosty.” . Odd and sweetly mysterious, hearing Knox siinging religious words, he being decidedly UN- religion. The verses took us through the cold mid-winter to Bethelehm , a month late for the birth….

Angels and Archangels…

May have gathered there, Knox sang.

Cherabim and Seraphim

Thronged in the air.

And it seemed, Cherabim and Seraphim flocked overhead in The Last Mile in a season we’d decided was mid-winter, whatever the calendar might say. Of course, that famous carol, for all who know it, went on for a few verses more. And so, Christmas had come back briefly and flashed again at The Last Mile, like a fluttering bulb on a snow-covered evergreen. The tree and Knox’s voice, and every vestage and reminder of The Birth vanished in the lingering dim light.

Cold and snow were coming.

The handful of patrons went back to their drinks, I to my cup of hot tea, thinking about that girl I’d known so briefly. Knox, very pensive now, back to his Blushing Monk with its Benedictine, lime and exotic what-not. He might have been thinking of the Maltese Hairdresser who sped in and out of his life.

It was night – in the bleak (almost) mid-winter, at The Last Mile.

Deano at the bar turned from the Weather Channel to the Bruins. They were beating the Vegas Golden Knights at The Garden.

Life went on –in a bleak, paralyzing mid-winter.

But I like to believe the angels lingered, with Ms. Rosetti and that red-headed brief acquaintance who, according to that old obituary, as I remember it, went on to do her doctoral thesis on, none other than the poet Christina Rosetti.

Listen to Gustav Holst’s arrangement of “In the Bleak Mid-Winter”:

FIRST DAY BACK TO THE LAST MILE: DREAMS OF ‘JUICY LUCY’ BURGERS AND THE SADNESS OF DRIVEWAYS

My debit card got hacked, probably from some unwise on-line activity, and I blocked my debit and credit cards for safety’s sake and cursed the world in which these thefts happen. Happily, my bank blocked all suspicious transactions (out in Californa), but I am left, at least for seven to ten days, without any plastic for a trip I was planning on taking down to Florida. I pulled cash out of the bank and went over to The Last Mile, a familiar place, to calm my aggravation and despair, pull things back into perspective and be diverted from that feeling that my life, in the short term, would be uncomfortable and complicated at the very moment I wanted to be at ease.

For some reason, The Last Mile is a good place to escape to — if one’s goal is the simple life, where cash is welcome, even preferred.

It was Friday, early into the new year and I stepped into the Mile around lunchtime, unusual for me. I rarely get there around lunch time. I was sad to see that the Christmas tree was gone. There were still some pine needles in that right-hand corner where it always goes up. There was still a HAPPY NEW YEAR greeting strung over the bar mirror. Life has resumed. There were about five people having either a hot dog or a burger.

The Mile is not known for its food, but owner Joe Barron (who flew back down to Miami this morning, probably on the same flight I was going to take) continues to give it a try from the 20×20 kitchen he added where there used to be a storage room. But he’s wisely continued to limit it to The Mile’s traditional fare of burgers and dogs. He just makes sure they’re good and that his cook buys only the best brands of beef and wieners and he only charges six bucks for them, with chips or fries.

Joe has to provide food under terms of the state Common Victualer’s license. State regulators don’t want people drinking without food available to follow it down and soak it up, although plenty of joints get away with it by just selling chips. Joe didn’t want his place to be such a joint. It would be a “family place”–with (some) food.

As I’ve probably told you in the past, Joe admits, when you happen to ask him, that he keeps this old establishment going sort of for sentimental reasons. But it’s a legend, this tavern with the seemingly ominous gloomy name and a reliable cast of characters dining and imbibing at any hour of the day or week. He owns the whole woodframe corner building. He’s got plenty of money, lives on the waterfront in Lynn when he’s not in Florida. The Last Mile is just one among his contributions to society and humanity, a warm place in life’s storm for some of the local world’s souls in search of comfort in the form of food, drink and community.

Joe’s cook is a young Hungarian-born guy named Andras who buys and cooks up his dogs and burgers and who lives in an apartment around the corner. Once upon a time, there was an unused old grill behind the bar, but that was an historical vestage from an earlier time — the early fifties when it was run by long-dead relatives of Joe Barron, catering to long-departed patrons who long-ago happily consumed dogs and burgers on the premises

Small kitchen, small menu — burgers, fries, fish sandwiches ( made from frozen filets) davailable on Fridays for the occasional Catholic still observing Friday abstinence. All the food goes in a big freezer that takes up a lot of the small kitchen space– big enough to handle the food supply adequate for a neighborhood establishment that doesn’t get a lot of lunch traffic.

But I know Joe has “food” dreams and would like to make his place famous for something you can eat there — some kind of special burger. He knows there’s a plain old sports bar in Norwood, Mass called Lewis’s and that it serves something called Lewis Burgers — I think it’s a fried egg on a burger.

I told Joe if he’s thinking about adding eggs, he should just serve breakfast.

“No, no, no. I don’t want Deano or anybody to have to open before daylight. This year, I’m thinking of getting my guy to make these Juicy Lucy burgers he keeps telling me about, stuffed with cheese. Can you imagine? And any kind of cheese you want.”

It didn’t send me, hearing Joe talk about it. I’m thinking of all the great and hopeful things I can dream about in the new year. A burger stuffed with cheese isn’t one of them.

As it was, I decided for the first time –believe it or not — to sample one of the Mile’s burgers, hand-shaped by Andres. My recent debit card misfortune was on my mind and I shared it with Deano, the bartender, who told me he’d been hacked once, too. He was going to let me put the burger and a ginger ale on a tab, but I paid from the wad of cash I had to withdraw from my bank to see me through until the new cards come.

* * * * * * * Anyway…enough about The Mile’s food history. * * * * * *

As I was downing my burger, Deano leaned in and said, “did you see who’s here? “

I thought I’d seen everybody who was there, but he indicated the guy we’d come to know only as Bill, sitting by himself at a table in the middle of the room. “Bill from Salem” is how we knew him. He had recently moved to Salem, was a salesman for a big international tech company that currently has offices in Danvers and didn’t know many people. I’d seen him in The Mile just before Christmas and sat with him, just to be cordial. He’s a nice guy, but a bit of a mystery — like a lot of people who come into The Mile. You always ask yourself, how did this person wind up here?

So, after I finished my burger, I picked up my ginger ale and went and sat with him again. (I think that was why Deano was pointing him out — he looked kind of lonely and a little exotic in sports coat and tie the middle of the room that in the last fifteen minutes had welcomed about six chattering Revere city maintenance workers.

I greeted him and we chatted while he finished his burger and Micholob draft. We talked about the weather (which has been up and down — lots of ice and snow recently, and rain), sports, a little politics, then he said something that froze me in my tracks. He said, “my wife backed down the driveway this morning. Gone, I guess, for good. Packed up everything of hers, and our five year marriage was over.”

I said, “Bill, I’m so sorry.”

“I appreciate that.” He sat back. “We moved here with the highest hopes.” He laughed. “I wonder if moving into the city of witches jinxed us.”

I assured him that was unlikely. To my relief, he was laughing, meaning he was joking. But he wasn’t serious anyway. And he’d never said anything about his wife being a witch, or anything at all unpleasant about her, to the extent that he mentioned her at all. He hadna’t said much about her at all.

“I’m originally from Texas,” he said (I thought I detected an accent), lived in twenty-two places growing up. My work took me to cities around the world and I’ve lived in ten places in this country. Married seven times. This was number seven. Those women shared one or more of the houses in those ten places.”

“Some unlucky numbers, there,” I said.

“All numbers are unlucky for some people,” he said. “But you know what I’m seeing in my rear view mirror now, speaking, ah, ‘metaphorically’, as it were?”

“What’s that?” I was maintaining a tone of sympathy, mingled with an anticipatory sense that I was about to hear a piece of a life story, that I should be glad a near-stranger would trust me with such a personal revelation, whether I wanted it or not . The Mile for me often finds me on the receiving end of wild personal disclosures, like Knox and his Maltese hairdresser.

My sense was right. But the revelation was inaugurated in a most peculiar way, with a single word.

“Driveways,” he said.

Driveways! Yeah, that was strange. I suppose in the Automotive Age, driveways have come to be important. (But, really? Driveways?)

Bill from Salem-by-way-of-Texas explained:

“Watching Terry (that must have been his most recently exiting wife’s name) —especially watching her back down the driveway –and I have a nice house with a nice long driveway – I thought how often I’ve watched a wife back down a driveway. Always had nice houses. they always had nice long driveways. I usually drive a good car, got a new Lexus LX 600 Ultra out there, parked around the corner.”

“Don’t want to leave it out there after dark,” I said.

“No, just stopped for a beer and a bite. I’ll be making some business calls and then I’ll be home to my empty house by the sea, and my single bed.”

It seemed I’d unwittingly, by offering my always-sympathetic shoulder, drop a bucket into a deep, sad well. I sipped my ginger ale.

“No,” Bill went on, I guess I have to asked what’s up with me, do a little self-analysis. Always worked hard, done well, earned lots of money, met lots of women, fell in love often. But I’ll always have to look out a window, or stand at the top of a driveway and watch them–always having their own cars — back down the driveway and drive away.

“Oh, sure, there’s contact with them afterwards, over the phone or at a lawyer’s office or in court– usually, anyway, not always — but that particular trip down the driveway, backing slowly down and away from me — and imaginging myself a disappearing figure in a window or at the top of that driveway, always wanting to watch, sometimes going down to the sidewalk or curb and actually watching their cars go out of sight — over the horizon as it were, I guess that’s the moment I feel my loss. Somehow I always want to see that trip down the driveway. It lets me ask myself — what went wrong?

“Of course, it’s never just one thing, it’s always lots of things, but then there is this one thing: seven women have decided they didn’t love me or I didn’t love them enough or the way they wanted to be loved and that my money, my looks were not enough for them.”

Looks? No, that’s never enough, I thought. But then, Bill -from-Salem’s looks were not, from a male point of view and I imagined for a women’s as well –not bad. Classically American, not Lynn/ Revere/East Boston ethnic or mediterranean. No, they were good, kind of blond nordic/ Scandanavian. He has blond/gray hair, a tall man, looking fit, probably has a gym membership…

He proffered his own judgement on his looks.

“No, I make a good apperance, I’m pleasant. But the women all announce they’re leaving — and they leave. Down the driveway backwards they go. They’re rarely parked facing forward, so between glancing at the mirror and maybe occasionally looking up at me, the final act in the drama is this act of reversal. It’s all hope –the Mercedes or the Escalade, the Jaguar– or one time, believe it or not, a woman named Matilda, wife number four, took her leave in a brand new Lamborghini, shining brightly in the sun as she and the car faded away, down the driveway, gone. It’s the end. Hitting the road! Out of here!”

He drained the last of his draft beer. It occured to me that he was a guy who could have been drinking Chivas Regal. Deano had a bottle at the bar. But I guess this Bill was humbling himself among the plebs.

Finally, after sitting quietly, I asked: “You alright, Bill? There’s a priest that comes in here occasionally, comes from a church real close by. He might be in the rectory for you to talk to. Or maybe you’d like a minister or a psychologist Believe it or not, the last time I checked, we have one of each come in here now and then. You don’t look Jewish, but if I’m mistaken, I know a rabbi who’s been in here at least once. Or how about this? Maybe you should by a place without a driveway. Live in a high-rise. When the women go out the door, they shut the day, and unless you feel like you’ve got to watch them walk to the elevator…or even if you walk them to the elevator…the doors close….

Bill thought I was kidding. Let’s face it. I was. Who the hell cares how anybody leaves you? The driveway they go down is in the mind. (Boy, I am getting out there — with Bill, who had gone way out there. I was wanting to see him go down a driveway…

“Funny,” said Bill (yes it was), and, regarding his emotinal health, (which he obviously had rightly begun to question, he said: “I’m sure I’m a little odd to be talking about…driveways (another laugh), but really…I always see…”

“Driveways,” I said. “I guess some people will see runways, you know, after they take that person to the airport.”

“Oh well,” Bill said. Been through it too many times now, the reversal, I’ll call it.”

“How about being a bachelor?”

It seems he was thinking along those lines, because he said, “they drive in, they drive out….maybe it’s time for me to think about living alone.” He looked around. “I could always come here if I’m feeling lonesome.” He looked around. ” I’ve been in here just one time before. It’s not my kind of place, usually. But I stopped in that first time because the traffic was backed up out front. I felt like a quick beer, the place looked respectable. Small and respectable. The bar tender, what’s his name?”

“Deano.”

“Deano! He was on duty that day, very friendly and welcoming. So I vowed I’d come back some day if I needed company and a little cheering up.”

“Well, I’m glad,” I said.”I’m Greg, by the way.” At last I introduced myself! He shook my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Greg. Thanks for letting me bend your ear.”

“Kind of tough,” I said, “finding yourself all alone in the middle of y our life with the holidays barely over.” At this point, I was distracted by the side door arrival of three United Airline flight attendants, still in uniform, who drop in the Mile from time to time. Bill didn’t see them.

“Holidays kind of do it to me–or to the women,” Bill said. “A lot of my separations happen in January.”

All of a sudden, one of the flight attendants, named Molly Greeley, was standing at our table.

“Hi, Greg,” she said to me. And smiled toward Bill. Molly is a real friendly soul, divorced, brunette, maybe forty-seven-years-old, a veteran flight attendant based, like the other two,out of Boston, originally from someplace in Rhode Island. And she’s pretty. No doubt about it. As I say, she was looming over us, smiling. She knew me slightly; knew my name, at least. “I gotta ask you,” she said, ” that your Lexus out there on the street?”

“No, no, you kidding, Molly? No,not mine. ” I indicated Bill. “This is the owner right here. Bill .” I turned to him. “You know, actually, Bill, I don’t know your last name.”

“Bill Harris,” Bill said, and suddenly stood up in a courtly manner offered his hand to Molly, and said , “Care to join us?”

Molly, as it happened, had ended her shift, was holding a cocktail and was headed to join her co-workers at a table near where the Christmas tree had stood. She explained how she was at the end of her shift, tired, just wanted a cocktail (looked like a rum and coke) and that her co-worker friends were over there waiting for her. whereupon Bill said, “then do you mind if I join you?”

And so he did. My last sight of him as I left — glancing first over at Deano behind the bar, who merely send a knowing look my way — was of Mister Bill Harris, prosperous but serially married and divorced and now seriously lonely–a high-end traveling sales executive, seated with three flight attendants, all in uniform. And I wondered if one of them would become the next Mrs. Harris -and one day make her apperance backing down some future driveway somewhere in America where a man of Mr. Harris’s means would be likely to move her. Or was Bill Harris destined to have his new love exit down a runway and leave him on watching her disappear through TIA security?

I walked down to the beach afterward, (glancing at Bill’s shiny new Lexus, following a circuitous route, electing to amble down the winding little side streets, passing more than one house having a short stub of a driveway of ancient broken pavement and macadam next to some humble woodframe working class soul’s domicile, being the kind of houses you find in that neighborhood. Sometimes there would be a dented, weatherbeaten auto, clear coat worn away, parked in it. These were driveways of ordinary people who probably rarely traveled but felt lucky to have a place to stow their cars when the snow piled up and the parking bans kicked in. Maybe there had been sad exits on these driveways, too, by men or women, husbands or wives, sons or daughters, bumping into reverse and backing down those mere ten yards or so between rusting, broken-down chain link, out into a cracked and narrow, over-familiar street that had been their street, shifting from reverse to drive — and driving off and away from the world or situation –or the person or persons — they were determined to leave behind — and, in many cases, were destinted to miss.

Where. I mused, was the driveway in the heart of Texas that Bill Harris had backed down, probably at a tender age in his first car –some scarcely exclusive make or model he’d quickly outgrow as he headed away from his world and into the world of corporate, monied isolation — in search of a wife and love ?

Sitting on a bench at Revere Beach, looking across cold sand peppered here and there with gull and pigeon feathers and the occasional cigarette butt — out at the cold blue winter Atlantic, all the way to the horizon, and I thought about the end of things, and new beginnings.

And I silently wished Mr. Bill Harris a Happy New Year.

NEW YEAR’S EVE, 2025 AMID GRAY MEMORIES OF THE GRAY LIGHT OF 1973 TURNING INTO A GRAY 1974

Forty-nine years ago. Almost Golden, but a decidedly unburnished shade of gold we’ll call gray. Something made me think of this time, on this day when we burn old calendars and the passing of time is on our minds.

I was living that year — 1973/74 – in a studio apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston between where Comm Ave traffic and trolleys bank left and Brighton Ave. begins straight ahead – and I was a block up Comm Ave from the corner of Harvard Street, right along the Brookline line. I was living in one of those bay-windowed, drab rows of amber brick apartment buildings — the last in an unbroken row before the jumble of offices and night spots commences leading up to the corner of Harvard Street.

At some point, I got in my car that afternoon of New Year’s Eve to go somewhere while it was still daylight — I forget where I was going, or why. Comm Ave is wide and double-barrelled at that point, and I somehow, completely sober, turned onto the wrong barrell. A concerned soul coming in the right direction pulled up and blocked me from going any farther, assuming I was one of those folks who’d gotten an early start at the celebration. I wanted to get out and explain to him that I’d immediately realized my mistake and just wanted to travel the twenty feet to where I could turn into the parallel road and u-turn. But I was forced simply to back up and u-turn to get going right. I’m sure the other driver figured I was drunk.

Why am I thinking of this now?

Well I guess because it’s one of many New Year’s Eve’s in my life — there have been far more memorable ones. This one, in fact, was rather drab. I don’t recall how I rang in that particlar new year.

I guess all I recall about that time and place (again, Comm Ave, Boston, 1973 into 74) when I was twenty-seven is how isolating that period felt,I having until around October of ’73 lived “in communion” with three other guys in a house at the quiet far edge of Cambridge on the Belmont line, far from city noise and squalar and danger. Those guys would remain my friends forever. One of them was already my friend prior to that point in my life, and he was the one who invited me to join the house — which was breaking up because one guy was going off to Indiana to graduate school , the other ( his former Harvard undergraduate roommate) to teach law in Miami, the third — I forget where he was going, except into a studio apartment in Cambridge. He lives in Chelsea now. (I’ll send him a greeting. He lost his brother this year.)

My lime green Pinto — my first car — was stolen from out behind theComm Ave building on the following Washington’s Birthday. That civic anniversary helps fix the date of the theft in my mind. It turned up in the D Street Project in South Boston, a notorious nest of criminal white punks. They’d tried to pry open my trunk to see whatever else they could steal. (I wonder where those little pricks are now, on this New Year’s Eve? Old men, dead, reformed ex-cons, unreformed, still incarcerated. They’d broken off the ignition and must have started the car with a screw driver.

The neighborhood was notoriously transient. I managed to make friends with the pretty girl across the hall (I found her name recently in a journal but will not repeat it here). She was a good friend, eager to make a romantic connection, but not with me. We didn’t have a lot in common. I recall playing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for her and she declared it ‘crap music.’ ( Not that that makes her a philistine — Stravinsky is an acquired taste – and the Rite of Spring ain’t a serene classical serenade.) We hung out a little. She had female friends, too. I don’t know, it occurs to me, where she was from originally — probably the Boston area.

I would come to learn that she had been raped while living at her last address not far away. She told me what portions of the terrible story she could bear to repeat.

She was good to me, cooked a spaghetti dinner for me once, invited me over now and then. She had cooped herself up with a very high-strung Irish Setter dog — imagine living with a big dog in a little urban studio! But she was not the only woman in that building who sought security and companionship with large pedigree canines, even though dogs were not allowed. I saw the poor guy who emptied the trash stuggling with the terrible odor of dog waste. I’ll reveal at least that her first name was Susan. She also had a massive security door lock that had a pole extending from the inside of the apartment to the inside of the door to the hallway. It was firmly secured to a plate on the interior hallway floor I don’t have to explain why she would have such a lock.

I’ll stop there. Hadn’t meant to ramble on about this, a gray laser trained on a brief gray moments in a gray time in a gray building in a gray neighborhood.

It’s 2:05, and I see that memory drifting off in a gray mist.

I hope my old neighbor Susan, wherever she is, has found bright colors, safety, freedom, romance, marriage, children, even grandchildren. She’d be in her seventies now. She was working during that period as a legal secretary at a downtown law firm where a fellow secretary told her of an apartment open in her Cambridge building. That was how I found my next apartment — where I was very happy in a neighborhood north of Harvard Square. I would live there from October, 1974 until Labor Day Weekend, 1979 when I hooked up my Dodge Dart (I’d gotten rid of the Pinto) to a UHaul and departed for a life-altaring period of TV employment in Fort Myers, Florida.

So I have to be grateful to this Susan for making that connection for me.

I last saw her when I’d pulled up to an intersection one night coming from my newspaper job’s main office in Dedham. It was at the border of West Roxbury on Route One. She was in the car that pulled up next to me. She was on a date with a guy I knew she was seeing who happened to be a young cop. (She’d wound up getting to know him during the legal aftermath of her very bad experience.) She spotted me and greeted me happily through the open passenger-side window of her date’s car. I was smoking a small Parodi cigar. It was a winter night; I was wearing a winter coat, probably still driving that little Pinto.

“Since when do you smoke cigars?” she asked cheerily, and from all appearances happy to see me.

“Since I got decadent,” I said, that being the only stupid thing I could think to say. (I wish I’d said, ‘since about ten minutes ago.’)

We chatted ever so briefly –seconds — with her cop date looking over from the driver’s seat appearing very friend, though maybe wondering if I were a rival.

Then the light changed, we drove off, and that was it. Gone forever.

Green light. Gray light. Green/Gray memories.

I’m braced for a new year far into my life, far from that time and place.

It’s 2:13 p.m. Sunset is at 5:46 p.m. E.S.T. (I’ll bet they’re already swarming into Times Square.)

I must make it a good year, for me, for everybody I meet.

I must make good memories.

Bright memories.

Goodbye, gray times.