Home Monday, October 30, 2023
I went home yesterday although home is defined by a number
of places none of which are the one I have to live in now.
Part of the ritual of going back is stopping off at Peggy's
grave where I had left a blue teddy bear a few months ago, blown off to someone
else's grave but put back a number of times, still surviving the weather.
She, of course had, wanted a Paddington Bear and complained
about the one that was stolen -- this in between her rants about the New York
Giants
I pinned in New York Giants pin onto the lapels of the blue
bear, repositioned it in front of her grave and then moved on, aware that next
St Valentine's Day Eve will be the 25th anniversary of her suicide.
Our world is full of such sad moments, especially when I
return again and again to find change.
My ritual is to go to the old laundromat, have a cup of
coffee, write some and then wander the neighborhood. But the rain made it
impossible to walk far. So, I drove passed the old apartment on Passaic Street
and then up River Driver to the Route 46 bridge, cross into Clifton and the old
house where I grew up on Crooks Avenue.
I parked just off Vernon on 1st Street and then took the
slow walk up Crooks avenue past the old Dr Fraulo's House, passed the former
Brett's house, passed my old house. across the gas station and then oddly
enough I decided to go into the church where I had gone to mass and had all of
my rituals of growing up Catholic.
There was some event going on that was not a mass, a bunch
of kids and their nuns and some kind of rosary society and other things all
associated with Christian teaching.
I sat back through it all until the video screen came on and
became annoying and strolled back out into the rain down 1st Street to the car,
the Paulison car driving to Trenton then from Trenton down Crooks to Paulison
Avenue which at that point is Hazel Street and then down Hazel Street through
another memory lane to where I lived for a year in the Paulison Arms and then back onto the Passaic
Street going towards route 3 ,stopping off at an old too familiar Park with its
falls and it's geese.
With umbrella in one hand and camera in the other, I
strolled around the centerpiece of the park, recalling those days when I was
unemployed when I would come here to read after visiting the library. This was
a place of Holiness, where there was a goose that used to chase the visitors.
We called him mayor. He once chased my car with ill intent
The other memory here was when I was reading and a
prostitute tried to get me to hire her, somewhat old at the time when I was
still in my late twenties and there was something sad in the whole affair which
I did not engage in, part of my own stupidity I guess I had a similar
experience when younger in New York when I was in the village and a woman
appeared to flirt with me only to turn out to be a prostitute as well I had no
money and she let me go kindly letting me purchase a pack of cigarettes for her.
Even though Paulie never wandered into this park with me it
always reminded me of him because of the library, because often I would drive
him to the library and then come here by myself only to return to pick him up
and take him home again another ritual home in that case being the apartment on
Passaic Street
At the end of the day, I got back into the car drove back to
the highway and headed for what is my real home, my current home, the place
that shelters me from this storm, and yet all of my memories are back in those
places I visited and perhaps even the burned down building in Montclair as well
those places where I left a piece of myself and pieces that can never be
recovered only revisited from time to time in the rain with an umbrella in one
hand.
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