35 degrees in Boston as day dawns, December 24. There a 90 per cent chance of rain — a rainy Christmas Eve? Now it looks like it might snow. A white Christmas? Really? Gray drops falling into snowy remnants of the recent freeze and snowfall? Or fresh, glowing snow of the kind the child in us likes to sing and dream about. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, at the Lounge….
Haven’t been to the Lounge in a while. The Last Mile Lounge out where the cities of Revere, Lynn and East Boston, Massachusetts converge like carnival bumping cars, not far from the ocean at Revere Beach, the airport (a crazy place today), the city (glowing night and day until the new year when it will submerge again in cold and gray), the country and all of life and nestled in a neighhood of happily variegated wood and brick homesteads that, for Christmas Eve, sit quietly where, now and then, on narrow streets off the main route into Lynn across the marshes, a soul or two will come to stand before some woodframe ghost and tell their kid they grew up there and tell them about the things that happened in the small front lawn if there is one and the back lawn if they can see it where it backs into other houses or some old garage.
By nightfall, those houses, occupied by generations born more recently, some in this century, will glow with lights. Great. Silent Night.
The year will end soon. End again, begin again. On and on and on.
For now, the Last Mile Lounge has its scattering of Christmas decorations — Deano the bartender stopped spraying that fake snow on the window. HIs old girlfriend Jean liked it. She moved someplace south, oddly, to escape the real snow and Deano figuired there’s enough real snow around every year that he doesn’t need to be spraying fake stuff. Crazy things we do for girlfriends.
But he does put some poinsettia on the ledge in front of the windows; he does hang stuff above the mirror behind the bar and around the main room –and, of course, there is the tree that got deocrated during the tree-trimming party on the 17th. Joe Barron, the owner, insists on a Scotch Pine or a Fraser Fir, no balsam. Guess it has to do when HE was a kid. (Joe is usually down on Key Biscayne, but somebody told me he’s back and occupying one of the two upstairs apartments — Knox the artist is in the other. Knox, by the way has finished his Man Walking The Last Mile mural — only to have the nurses and a group of Revere City Hall secretaries come in and tell him it’s depressing — a guy walking between two prison guards headed for the swining door down a long corridor — and The Chair. “It’s for guys who won’t straighten ou,” he told them.” But that didn’t satisfy them. “I’m married to a guy who won’t straighten out,” said the woman named Cheryl. That led to a lot of bad jokes — so much so that Knox spent three days changing around the whole mural so that it’s a painting of a guy smiling between two smiling guard walking BACK from The Chair — alive….and Deano started serving a drinking at the bar call Governor’s Reprieve.” Then Knox stuck a sign under the three guys saying, MERRY CHRISTMAS.–and painted santa caps on all three guys.
“You ruined it,” said Charlie Simonetti. But his girlfriend Cheryl Burkhardt said, “I love it.”
Knox drank the first Governor’s Reprieve, skipping his usual Blushing Monk. “I’ll turn them around after the the New Year,” he said, feeling warmed by the Reprieve, no doubt, who’s ingredients I’ve yet to learn. I sat down next to him, slapped him on the shoulder, wishing him the greetings of the season and ordered my cranberry and seltzer with a twist of lime.
Deano has his little manger set up behind the bar. The magi are down by the bottle of Old Bushmill, working their way toward the Epiphany.
“Kids are coming by about 7:30 with their parents to sing carols,” Deano told me.
“Kids in a bar?” I ask.
“Outside — out the side door on Myrtle Street. Safe and sound. We raised money for their trip to the LaSalette Shrine in Attleboro last year. And we collected canned goods for their food drive. It’s all about gratitude.”
“I’m grateful,” I said, and sipped my tart little Christmas cocktail.
Carols at 7:30. I was thinking I’d have to come back for that.
“Spanish and English,” Deano said. Stickey and the Crow will be here.”
Stickey and the Crow. I was wondering where they were. Stickey Sammartino and Jackie the Crow. Regulars as regular gets.
“God rest those merry gentlemen,” I said. Knox called for a toast. Everybody toasted —
Kenny Foy (I didn’t even see him over by the juke box) called for a toast of the three guys on the wall, especially the smiling convict – convicted but forgiven on Christmas Eve.
“Joy to the world,” said Athena Leroy, the realtor from Beverly (I didn’t see her, either.”
Dean plucked the Virgin from the creche, held her high. “To miracle births and mercy.”
“Very nice said Pippa Goldfinger who’d just parked her Mercedes and walked in the side door.
I walked down to the beach after that, to see the gray Christmas Eve clouds gathering and the December wind blowing in off the surf, a northwest breeze — and the seabirds were overhead–and a plane heading into Logan bearing sons and daughters home to mom, dad, grandmom, granddad.
First Mile, I thought. Miracle birth. I heard a church bell on the wind. Think I imagined it. Nearest church was — where?
Early Dark. Home for things unseen, unimagined. Pray like crazy, hearing children’s voices–and I hope that wasn’t gunfire.
No. Just a truck lowering his tailgate, making a delivery up by Kelly’s
Somebody working Christmas Eve. Bless him.
And is that a snowflake? Or a raindrop?
19 Cent Notebook 