The more things change Dec. 11, 2023
The rain came in spurts as I made my way to Secaucus for my
usual Sunday laundry. I don’t always go to Secaucus, sometimes returning to the
old neighborhood in Passaic -- as I will likely do next Sunday when I visit the
grave of Peggy, and the graves of my ancestors in the other Lodi cemeteries,
dating back to John the Baptist Sarti, who arrived here just after the Civil War.
But most weeks, I don’t want to travel that far as was the
case yesterday, when I parked near the laundromat, put my laundry into the machines,
then headed off to the Dunkin a block away for coffee, a Dukin I briefly worked
for after I got fired from the Garfield Dunkin just before my wedding in October
1990 (a time when I had four part time jobs, three of them at different Dunkins,
and a fourth as a cleaner for a firm that manufactured elixirs straight out of
the 1800s.
My history with Secaucus goes back to the 1960s when Hank
and I used to pass through it on our way to New York City, at a time when the
highway still went through the center of town. Later, in the early 1980s, I
came back to work in a Fotomat booth, situated in the middle of the Acme
Parking lot (Acme having since given away to CVS), where I set up my typewriter
and wrote my novels while waiting for customers – the old Library across the
street still a library then, and though the bank’s name has changed, the bank is
still a bank, a new bank has since cropped up where the Plaza Diner once stood,
and the other bank on the other corner is now abandoned, real estate brokerage
firms looking for someone to buy or rent that space.
Once I put my laundry into dryers, I walked passed old Chinese
restaurant (recently closed and redeveloped into a new, more acceptable venue
for the new generation slowly taking over our world), passed the shuttered
bank, passed the 60-year-old drug store, and the series of stores along that block
that included hair salons, travel stores and some office space, one of which
once houses a video rental store (talk about something out of time), and then
crossed to where the medial building stands, glancing briefly down the block,
looking for the Secaucus Home News sign that used to hang out a small shop
there, the 100-year-old community newspaper gone, if not forgotten, in this age
where people stare into their cellphones for news.
The rain came as I crossed Paterson Plank to the other side
where my bank sat – passed Charlie’s Corner bar, the founder of which once ran
for president on a ticket that featured a pig.) ATMs allow me to withdraw money
on Sundays, otherwise, I would have to make a special trip to Secaucus during
the week. Once inside, the small lobby, the rain came heavier and I stood under
the eves until it slowed again, and once it did, made my way back to the newspaper
store where I bought a bottle of brandy and my weekly allotment of lottery
tickets, before settling back in my car to write, a block from where I
purchased my first (used) IBM PC back in 1990. The building is still there but
changed colors.
All this seems trivial, of course, but it is the stuff that
makes up our lives, the small details of our experiences and how things change
and yet remain the same, and perhaps why I keep returning to this place each
Sunday when I have a laundromat a block from my house.
I need to keep track of it all, to witness the changes, as I
did back in the 1980s from my booth when they tore down the strip mall next to
the Acme (including the original donut shop) and rebuilt it into something more
acceptable to a modern mind, and later, when I returned to work here as a
reporter (from late 1992 to early 2004), I watched more things change, and yet
remain the same, small insignificant things that added up dramatic change in my
life, the memory of what stood where, and what will never be seen again, and of
what still endures, and may well endure long after I’m no longer here to
witness it.
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