What is and what may never be Sunday, December 31, 2023
It is the last day of a year I never thought I would live to
see.
Everything is reflection now, looking more in the rear view
mirror than at the road ahead, knowing that many more miles lay behind than I
can expect to tread.
Everything is scattered – like the aftermath of the big bang
as our lives spread out and separate from each other’s, in the end, each of us
condemned to our own tiny place a vast universe, where rising and falling stars
no longer apply, only that we still remain, traveling, though destined to burn
out.
I wake to darkness and cold, but not the frigid chill we
might expect for New Years Day, but as if we have already arrived in early March
and await blooming we know will not transpire for months to come, and yet hope
for.
I miss Pauly and Hank, even though they long ago faded from
my universe and have their own place elsewhere in a space that is beyond mine
at this moment, and only faith in the afterlife promises that we might meet
again.
This year, 2023, has not been as painful a year as 2022,
with only minor health issues that temporarily put us out. None can say what
2024 holds for us, since every year is a surprise, such as 2020 was, and 2012,
and perhaps a few stand out years previous to this.
Twenty years ago, I was getting ready to launch into a new
venture after the Hudson Reporter purchased the Bayonne Community News, and the
owners asked me if I wanted to move my beat from Secaucus to Bayonne, which I
did.
But it was a kind of death watch for a city – even if I was
unaware of it at the time, the old culture vanishing in anticipation of a new and
unrecognizable one, old institutions dropping off the map one after the other,
with only a handful of those that were part of the previous city holding on,
eventually losing their grip, leaving me to document their passing.
I miss the old office on 21st Street; the dusty, wood-paneled
space that was a time stamp for 1978 when the paper started, the old lay out
boards, the bank-like front, the back door barred by a piece of wood, and the
huge empty space next door that had once been a high level jewelry store,
knocked down to build a theater that never took place.
I frequently return to that space in my dreams, in the say
way I return to my cold water flat in Passaic, a place of safety, a place where
I seemed to fit in as an anachronism, as if I had spent my whole life in these
places and this is where I was destined to end up, even if the places
themselves vanished over time.
The change of ownership meant a change of culture, too,
since the paper more or less ran itself during the two years leading up to the
sale, the editors and others taking on the tasks the ill publisher could no
longer handle, senior citizens from across the street coming over each week to
insert circulars and fold the papers into bags for delivery.
We needed none of them since the Hudson Reporter paid a
staff to do just that, and the office became much more vacant for the lack of
those old faces whose purpose had ceased.
Less than 20 years later, we all got put out to pasture as
new owners with no love for the newspaper gutted it, leaving only the memory of
not just the Community News but the Hudson Reporter as well, two institutions
that had helped shape the history of the county for more than 40 years.
I go into the new year with expectations of greater change
as my world seems destined to become a dusty memory.
We live each day in anticipation that the next day will
follow, dragging behind us the baggage of a past few but ourselves care about,
and in the end, it is our legacy to remember, and the world’s legacy to forget.
We are what we were, not what we believe we might become.
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