When You Dance

Years ago I had a sexual dream about Donald O'Connor.  He was wearing that horizontal striped shirt Gene Kelly wore in Anchors Aweigh. I woke up feeling hung over and baffled: not only do I dislike stripes anywhere besides bedsheets,  but my male crush-template at the time was maybe Scott Weiland.  

Over the years I've had a few iconic, memorable actual dreams that feel epic-- cinematic-- long, complicated narratives with specific settings and locations that felt like inventions-- all featuring some Hollywood actor-- Brian Keith, in one-- who had no real association with anything or anyone.  I'd wake up feeling-- well, a little surprised... but connected. In high school I'd occasionally have a random dream about some boy I barely knew and then blush when I passed him in the hallway.  Little did he know, we'd shared some private intimacy which would remain part of my psyche. 

Of course, they say the people in our dreams are substitutes, like when we dream about a neglected dog, it's actually about our self. Regardless of where these come from, there's a literal hangover-- we replay what we recall in real time; we are affected. 'A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you're fast asleep...' sang Cinderella on my Disney album soundtrack. Children have nightmares... the lyric was confusing.

I just finished the superb new James Baldwin biography.  James participated in the famed March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his iconic 'I Have a Dream' speech.  MLK had not just a dream but a vision and a moral and social platform.  On a much more personal scale, my son recently realized his 'hoop-dream' of creating an urban basketball platform.  Of course this took incredibly hard work, planning and stress... fundraising, organizing, building, turning small failures into success narratives, and a coming of age. More than a dream, it's a passion he parlayed into a career ambition.  

My father, the war hero, was a fantastic dancer. Not like Michael Jackson or Gene Kelly, but he had incredible grace.  Watching him with my Mom at family weddings and celebrations, they were like movie stars in their own world... waltzing or samba-ing with harmony and skill.  It was sort of a revelation, seeing my parents this way-- transformed.

The US Open always reminds me of my father who was also a superb tennis player.  In fact, his dancing skills were probably honed because the tennis club where he worked as a boy recruited the young single employees to dance with random single women at their evening entertainments. He had plenty of practice, and experience with women in his pre-military career.  I'm sure that helped win my Mom over.  

'Do you love me, now that I can dance?' asked Dave Clark in one of the first 45's in my little collection.  My first real romantic experience was a slow-dance at a summer-camp mixer. I went to an all-girls Catholic camp that year and they integrated us once per season with a boys' camp from across the lake.  It was well chaperoned and the lights were bright, but the DJ put on 'Surfer Girl' and a tall boy held out his arms to 10-year-old me.  I could feel his heart beating, among other things.  But I realized dancing was sort of a physical metaphor. 

'When you Dance...I can really love' Neil Young sang and reinforced this metaphor.  There's an irony-- besides entertainers like Michael Jackson, rock musicians commonly do not actually dance much. Think Dylan, Tom Petty... Clapton, even Hendrix. They move around and weave a kind of sexual veil with their performance but they don't don't do steps. I've dated a few and offstage they can be a little awkward. 

Over years I've thought long and hard about the Donald O'Connor dream... were the initials significant?  Was this a substitute for my father?  As a young girl my father taught me a few steps; this was surely one of the few 'tender' moments between us. Knowing how to partner-dance was a part of our education. I was also sent to ballet-- to tap and jazz and modern dance because it turned out I loved learning steps and the choreographic role-playing.  Not to mention the music.  But dances-- parties-- this seemed to be a much more prevalent courtship ritual in 60's and 70's culture than it is now.  A slow dance with a new crush was a devastatingly sexy experience. I'm dating myself.  My college boyfriend and I loved dancing; it's what brought us together the very first night.  I miss this.

While I can't remember my father ever watching any of my dance recitals (and he certainly boycotted band gigs, lol)... he was very attentive at those of my son's school basketball tournaments he managed.  Although he doesn't really dance, my son shares a kind of athletic grace with his grandfather.  While I never shared my literal dreams with parents, I imagine my father might have been amused by the Donald O'Connor appearance.  I know how they relished watching those musicals...  and besides the Fred Astaire kind, he loved seeing James Brown, Sammy Davis Junior, and later, Michael Jackson. 

All these years later, I recall that old dream like an actual memory. Maybe it was a reference to my father I couldn't understand at the time. I'm trying, years after his passing, to smooth out the rough patches-- not to dance on his grave but to process the legacy with a little remedial choreography and the softer echo of old dreams.

August Thresholds

The threshold of sleep is fragile; on one side there are dreams, relief... on the other, the exhausted edge of living effort-- work, sorrow, anxiety, worry.  And on the far side, like unexplored ocean, there is death... or we hope so.

Waking these days in harsh light I feel the summer waning like an old moon. Oppressive heat in August is a little more bearable than July.  I memorized Jane in these evenings just one year ago gathering her various delicacies idiosyncratically...  me knowing it would be her last heatwave.  I have learned not to take things for granted... sunsets, weather, annoyances..shade.

Saturday I stepped outside on 12th Street to the distinct scent of animal-- hot fur, sweaty jungle skin... almost as though the street population of Union Square had migrated a few blocks down... the pungent phantom of exasperation-- of disappointment and failure, inequality and bad hygiene.  The park is filled with demonstrators, vendors, farmers' stalls and sidewalk deal-makers... shoppers, eaters... tourists and thieves... Across the way there is the department-store marvel of Whole Foods-- the behemoth horn-of-plenty of the bourgeoisie... the massive cooling machines bless you as you enter... the color-coded cashier lines humiliate you as you exit... back to the steamy sidewalk lined with defeated people of all shapes and colors with signs and cups and stories... the contrast is a shock.

Today I recall the palpable humidity of Neptune, New Jersey-- a car trip at one of those moments when your relationship is wilted and deflated... and you try some vintage honeymoon clichés-- the shore, the old Asbury Park landmarks.   You stand in the surf being photographed with your flowered dress clinging, your hair blowing in the hot breeze... knowing this is the end of something.  Meanwhile, nearly out of cash, we negotiated a basement room in a cheap motel at midnight.  I climbed the fence and swam naked in the concrete pool while everyone slept.  Even the room-conditioned air was soggy... as though our spoiled love had soaked into the walls and there was nothing left but the horrid turnpike back in a rental car that smelled of someone else's stale beer.  

Years before cell phones, when you were virtually alone with whomever... even with a sense of doom and personal despair... the low ceiling of crushing heartwreck hovering like a storm cloud... the summer was somehow the season of homesickness... of being sent away, of lonely nights in tents or cabins or sleeping bags... staring at the moon, longing for something you knew even then you'd never have.  It was as though you could feel love like seawater evaporating on your skin.  There was even a song, that Neptune summer... waiting for me to change your mind.  I didn't understand, and I let the tide run out, as it does.

In the early morning on the threshold of sleep I can hear the hum of air conditioning in the courtyard, the soft sounds of people stirring in their apartments... no longer putting a kettle on, as I do, but making coffee.  They say some children suffer night terrors because they fear death-- like a premonition, a memory from previous lives... Waking in August heat is disorienting; leaving a late-summer day is inherently sad for some of us... we blink in the darkness of rooms and lose our timeline.  Some of us regret.  

Some nights I imagine myself a desert child dreaming of surf... a deaf child hearing his own song... the far-off whistles of trains.  Stuck in the city-- deprived of beach and horizon vistas, I miss the sea like a lover.  It is the 'missing' that haunts my edge of sleep... the missing of things-- of people, the sense of being loved.  "If ever I would leave you,' my Mom used to sing to me... 'It wouldn't be in summer'.  I was safe.  Yesterday marked four years since she passed away... on the threshold of sleep, into another eternity she left me.  I will follow her one day... everyone leaves, someone said... as I drift in and out I remember so well watching her sleep, at the end; it was all she had left... 

Dogged

Somewhere between dusk and evening, I felt something slip through a hidden entrance- a cracked door, a hole in the sky.  I might have been on a plane from Tokyo... thinking about the way birds fly in a line some afternoons-- as though they are desperately trying to give us a sign, read us a message... and we, the opaque humans that we are-- fail to decipher, to notice, to apply.  I was staring out of a window on a long flight where time zones, geography, space and cultures melt and blur... where the view of atmosphere and clouds takes us to a place which seems un-life-like... close to the place we began, to the place we will rejoin.  Somehow it seems we are not meant to experience the literal milieu of an out-of-world place, that we are meant to be walking on the ground, using our feet and our hands like the primitive beings we once were.

Miles above our home, things like death, God, eternity-- they are within our grasp, we think... dreams and fantasy seem possible... we are one with the clouds... we are in the place of vast infinity and space.  On the ground, in a tiny room of the city, death was paying a visit to a friend I'd made maybe only because his illness compelled him to reach out, to connect with someone with whom he'd never have made contact.  But there we were-- star-crossed and intimate-- we adopted one another briefly, like my seatmate who had bared her heart to me before dinner.

Last month my other friend finally released herself from the agony which had worn her the way some homeless men cling to an old coat which has long ago lost its usefulness, its shape, its reason.  She died like an abandoned animal-- like a dog, the expression is, I think.  Besides me, who was for whatever reason bound to execute her final perverse wish,  there was no one to relieve her, to administer, to comfort.  Her cat, to whom she dedicated her final choices, seemed oblivious and callow.  It ran from end to end of the apartment every time I entered, rejoiced at the opening of a can, purred with gusto after feeding... watched me hawkfully as I failed to find any reasonable solution for my friend's discomfort.  The cancer devoured her like a hungry hyena, but cruelly left just enough so she was conscious of the hell of her disease.  It went on beyond the limits of any decent humanity.  In Hospice they would have dosed her lethally with morphine long before.  The only metaphor I could summon was being in hard unproductive labor for a year.  It was that bad.  Relentless.  On the wall was no Do-Not-Resuscitate, no final instruction except a note requesting that her ex-boyfriend-- the one who had not shown his face for years, even though he lived nearby and was listed as next-of-kin-- be called to pick up the cat in case she died.  From its age, I suspect this note had been posted many years before she had an inkling of cancer, and maybe worried she'd drink too much and hit her head on the floor some night.  Or that one of the myriads of unworthy men she bedded would get rough.

Anyway, 'cats' was on the note; as long as I'd been coming in and out to help her, there was only one surviving animal.  I'd spoken to several people I knew about her situation.  It was dire and she was pretty much destitute.  Personally I was raised with dogs.  My mother disliked cats and associated them with spinsterhood and eccentric lonely women.  She was superstitious and not sophisticated about certain things, but she raised me to avoid their company.  Dogs-- honest and boisterous and loyal.  They stay with you when you're sick; they grieve for you.  But what I discovered among the population of animal-lovers in my friend-circle, was their sympathy for her cat was universal while all they gave poor Lucia was a tilt of the head.

I see hoards of homeless people on the street these days.  I can't take a subway ride without being shaken down by an outstretched hand and a story; it feels like the 70's again.  Yes, I'm a sucker for these people.  After all, I ended up tending to a lonely ill woman who wasn't particular nice to me, and would never have given much attention to anyone's suffering.  I stayed to the very end, to the moment of heeding the instructed phone call on the wall even though I could have punched her ex for his utter lack of showing up, whatever their relationship.  She had no one.

A few people absorbed the fact that she'd passed through my posts and poetry.  The reality of her death was the worst thing I have ever experienced; the agony and hideous lack of closure is impossible to exorcise.  But for a situation where I was not even allowed to arrange a burial or funeral, the number of people inquiring about the fate of the cat was overwhelming.  And not just inquiring-- scolding me, insisting-- bleeding for the cat who was old and fine and not particularly sympathetic or charming... with not a word for her owner who had equally prioritized her animals.

On the Tokyo plane, I watched Lion.  The credits gave statistics on the staggering numbers of lost and missing Indian children.  I wept through most of the film.    Three nights before, I was half asleep and happened to catch some blurb about one of the Beverly Hills Housewives and her new charity to save dogs from cruelty in China.  Yes, I love animals.  I have nurtured strays, fed (yes!) cats and sick pigeons,  felt sorry for dead rodents.   I tried hard to communicate with my suffering friend's cat who seemed to ignore both of us.  But what I cannot comprehend is the utter failure of humanity to sympathize with fellow men as much as they adore their pets.  There are many abused animals, I agree; but the number of sick and negected children-- not to mention neighbors and friends who suffer needlessly and die without compassion and care-- is baffling.

So while I love my neighbors' pets and will care for their dogs when they are sick or away, I can't help wagging a finger at people who cannot find time to look in on a sick or ailing or helpless human being whose unfortunate psyche is created to feel the pains of loneliness and isolation nearly as much as physical discomfort.  The homeless who sit on corners with sad-eyed and hungry  animals get way more financial sympathy than they do alone.  What is wrong with us that we seem to disregard our own kind in favor of animals who I concede have very little hatred in their hearts? But neither do babies and humans who have not been mistreated and punished and deprived.

Let's put the human back in humane... let us not forget our fellow creatures, unappealing and ruined and seemingly ungrateful as they may be; when you are sick and unable and tired and must deal with the pathetically inadequate medical system which favors the rich and the animals among us... it is not easy.  Have at least the sympathy of an average dog.  Amen.

Villa Knell

When I was a girl in a New England summer theatre program I remember singing some song about 'The Knell'… it was a pre-Goth original indie musical someone had written for kids… I had no idea what this meant but it sounded ominous and dark.  Last night, lying in bed in the first summer-preview open-window sleep, this was playing in my head, like a lost Pink Floyd track.

At the end of my Latin Hip-hop dance class, we lie on mats and do some kind of core training and stretching.  For most of my life I've done some kind of dance-- in a studio, in a gymnasium-- often ending up on the floor, staring up at an ultra-high ceiling with fans and fluorescent lights.  It's a kind of continuity, a kind of comfort.  I remember missing my Mom at summer dance training, looking up, as a 9-year-old.  I remember crushing on some drummer as a teenager, stretched out on hard mats sensing my limbs and some kind of desire.  I remember weeping over a missing boyfriend as a young woman, hearing cool-down music, looking up at lights in metal housing, sensing the deja-vu.  Tonight they were playing a sort of reggae version of Cat Stevens' Wild World, pressing my nostalgia buttons, firing off endless flares of memory in that space where you are sweaty and tired, trying to collect your body and consolidate your energy for the night ahead or the walk home, sensing the ceiling as floor, the floor as a kind of springboard.  Sometimes our teachers would turn out the lights so we would become dancers without ego, without legs or arms-- floating corpses on a padded wooden sea of past choreography.  A kind of relief that it was over, a kind of sadness that every class, every routine, every performance has an ending.  An enforced rest-- the calm after the intense physical storm.

A friend called at 5 AM last night.  He confessed that every time he fell asleep he sensed that he might not wake up, and he would then force himself awake:  one of the many variations of insomnia that seem to be  afflicting my aging creative friends.  Sleep haunts people--evades us, tricks us.  I was so tired last night-- an exhausting week with nominal rest-- and I awoke startled from some disturbing dream, felt my heart pounding from some terror or dread… and got up like a psychic to answer calls.  Sleep is a kind of Catch-22 for some of us… a challenge, a dread-- something that steals our creative hours, consecrates our passions and consumes time…. like a friend whose company we crave, even though we know she will pickpocket and deceive us-- betray us while we are happily unconscious and ignorant.

My doorman has a new baby.  He is excited and reports to me every day.  Last night was the first relentless sleepless night.  The baby had a crying jag--- maybe colic, maybe some small discomfort-- maybe his evening milk was bitter… but he seemed inconsolable.  So complex, these infants who cannot communicate-- only cry.  Mothers learn to distinguish these cries-- hunger from pain from discomfort, colic from teething.  Sometimes it just sounds like fear and you convince yourself this is impossible… that besides the trauma of birth-- how can these emotions manifest?  Or maybe the ingrained fear of abandonment, the initial separation-- maybe this is valid and universal and we are virtually born with death in our DNA and the subconscious knowledge that we will be ultimately left, no matter how good or beautiful we are.  We will lose our audience, our friends, our lovers, our family-- our selves.  The baby knows this, somehow, and has no control or comfort.  You hold it and rock it and feed it and nothing works.  A tiny night terror.  You hope this will not become habitual.

Do babies dream?  Science says they do-- the way dogs dream, within the realm of experience, subconscious and electrical brain impulse… and maybe this was a first nightmare-- maybe it was being 'set' somehow in this tiny psyche, and would become the nightmare homepage.  The deep fear or terror which weaves itself into our soul, becomes part of our dance-- our walk, our thought process and decision-making.

Another friend called at 6 AM.  He has lost all structure-- the boundaries between night and day have disintegrated.  This happens to musicians, in a good way.  We are outside of biological patterns and the rule of daily sunrise and sunset.  We are free-- we work when we work, play when we play, eat when we eat…. sleep when we sleep-- or not.  But it wreaks havoc with our sense of continuity-- our structure.  Walls blur, floors move, light taunts and 'straight' life seems disconnected.  We are outsiders… party people when we are young-- edge-makers and trend-setters… and a little daft and baffled when we are old-- fragile and twig-like we dream through glass and float on falling bedclothes.  Our nightmares are often things that have happened, things that will not happen… our dread is the alarm clock, our ambition becomes the nod, our eyes close just as they are about to see.

I tried so hard to understand my doorman's baby… as I tried to understand my own baby boy, who has always been such a good sleeper.  Through injury, through troubles, through break-ups, victories and losses-- he sleeps.  As for me, I hear the Knell song… like a nostalgic old soundtrack the meaning haunts every phase of my post-dance physical malaise-- from little girls in pink leotards to women in yoga clothes, executing choreography designed for way younger people-- trying our hardest to conform to a group, to hear the commands and the music as it evolves…. a lot of nice things turn bad out there… the song warns… I'll always remember you, like a child, girl… I was not much more than a child when I first heard that record… the word always sounds so different now that it has become stretched into a fuller lifetime, now that most of my years are in the past rather then the future.  I suppose every song has its Knell… every dance has its ending… every room has the ceiling you can turn into a floor if you squint and dream.

My boy is a man.  He doesn't share his terrors; he has few, I think.  I have plenty of 'knell', that's certain.  Enough for 5 generations and then some.  Words like 'time' and 'dark' and 'rain' and 'sad' have an extra prick for me.  Love has an edge… desire has a black lining… even 'baby' has a certain heart-shaped soft-shell.  Skin…

My fiancee many years back was deported from the country.   Denied entrance-- sent back.  A forced separation like a violent emotional amputation.  We'd been so attached, so physically interwoven.  It was unbearable for a while… and then I began to swim.  Lap after lap in a dark blue pool, as though I was drowning in my own tears, I found the backstroke… where I could stare up at the ceiling lights like stars, like a  swimmer in a kind of empty Egyptian tomb… silent and alone… a version of rehearsal for the nights I've come to embrace of late: wet soundtracks and the blue light of slow morning.  The unpredictable strokes of sleep-- words in my head, questions in my heart, missing children and lost loves at my side, and now the Knell… like an unlit candle…. not even calling… just there, like the sense of church bells or the way most of us go from day to night to day--knowing and not knowing, listening and not listening, seeing and not seeing, fearing and not fearing, loving and not loving, remembering and forgetting, turning down some old bedclothes in vain, calling out through dreams, turning reluctantly and bravely toward some version of light…

American Tourister

When I graduated high school, my parents gave me a set of luggage.  It was a curious gift-- not anything I'd ever thought about.  Maybe it symbolized my coming-of-age Bon Voyage.  For me, I couldn't think of anything I had to put in there.  They seemed like things that adults had-- practical things, and felt like a sort of unfulfilled promise I'd made, accepting them.  In those days they hadn't invented wheels-- these cases were heavy and cumbersome. But I had no choice.  I packed one for college, and it was a pain to stow in our tiny crowded dorm rooms.

My college boyfriend gave me a puppy at school--- she grew up to be this graceful deer-like German Shepherd mix who followed us around, slept outside my classroom buildings, etc.  In those days there was a whole hippy culture of campus dogs.  Anyway, one day she was kidnapped by a hideous character who crashed parties and stalked girls.  I followed her trail of blood to the parking lot where he must have let her out, after slashing her.  We desperately tied ripped up sheets around her wound and tearfully hitchhiked to the nearest Vet who promised to cure her, but didn't.  Her violent death haunted me for years.  We collected her cold body, wrapped her in my coat, and buried her inside my blue suitcase at the Jersey Shore.  She'd loved the surf, the beach; she was so beautiful and elegant, and had used my case as a bed on many occasions-- curled up in there, with the blue satin lining.

Sometime during college I met the great love of my life--- that breed of bad angel with a jagged halo and a guitar who steals your heart clean.  It was a wrecking and passionate story… and in the end, each of us went our separate ways--me to New York, he to his childhood girlfriend who heartbreakingly stood by and suffered his indiscretions.  Once I'd seen her--- she begged me-- I couldn't bear her sorrow.  Anyway, the night before their wedding, he showed up-- drove down from Boston, with a packed suitcase in the trunk.  Let's elope, he said.  We'll get married and take the Canadian railroad to Vancouver.  The suitcase was half empty.  I was overcome.  We sat up all night in a diner, drinking hot chocolate, planning our lives… and in the morning, I said goodbye.  He was late for his church wedding, but he showed up.  All that next week I kept thinking about the suitcase; we'd always thrown our stuff into the back of the car, like gypsies… but that suitcase was so new-- so 'adult'-- I felt the same burden I'd felt  at my graduation.  And thinking about the suitcases he no doubt had left with his wife… packed with what might have become relics of the death of marriage… things she would never have been able to open… This helped me find some sort of sad closure-- and besides, I had New York to explore…

My husband was a British journalist I'd met briefly who flew over to see me on a whim with no suitcase at all -- just the suit he had on, and a couple of books.  He brought flowers and came every weekend to renew his proposal.  One of my older and wiser woman friends remarked that if her husband had ever once looked at her the way this man looked at me--well, she'd die happy.  So I gradually let him pack up my things and carry them back to London, piece by piece.  I followed, with no suitcase-- and married him, had his baby, as I promised.  My last night in London involved his tossing my packed case from the window of our perfect flat, after a typically alcohol-fueled soliloquy about my going on the road, my imagined indiscretions--- whatever.  A lorry ran it over, and I flew PanAm from Heathrow for the last time.  After a few more dramatic episodes, he exited the marital stage, final act.  My son has not heard from his father in 20 years.  I left everything in the flat, including empty suitcases.

For years I used to see this old scruffy man with a beat-up cheap guitar in the subway.  He had one of those little portable seats and a red-plaid suitcase with a zipper--- the kind you'd see in a Hayley Mills movie from the 1950's.  He had piles of cassettes, hats, scarves, papers in that suitcase which he also used to hold the coins and dollars people threw in.  He sang like a saint, with this sandpapery edge in the lower registers, and his eyes watered.  The last time I saw him,  gaffers tape was holding that suitcase together.  His eyes were cloudy and his face looked drawn and hollow.  I wished I knew where he went at night, with that suitcase and his guitar… he didn't talk much.

There is something sad for me when I see people with luggage… coming, going-- saying goodbye, leaving something or someone behind.  Traveling is happy for tourists--- but for me I can't help thinking I'll never see these streets again, these buildings, this airport… I hate packing and I hate unpacking.  I hate endings.  Maybe that's why I seem to stay up all night until the morning--- so I know the light has come, and I'm safely into tomorrow.  Today I helped this Italian girl find the room she is renting in New York City so she can pursue her dream of becoming a singer.  She was so filled with hope, with her heavy suitcases and her new shoes.  I left her in front of the YMCA; I watched while they frisked and searched her things for some long minutes before they finally showed her the elevators to her overpriced little cubicle-cell which I hope is not too depressing, where she will unpack her dreams and hopefully find her way.  She asked me for my number, to have a coffee, but somehow I couldn't bear another New York City heartbreak, another sad ending, another unfinished story on ragged old papers of memory stuffed inside a suitcase.

Christmas Cheer

This year I got smart. I used the internet to search good deals on fresh trees in Manhattan. Only every single entry suggested somewhere in Queens or Staten Island. Tough for those of us with a UK driver’s license and no car.

Then there’s Home Depot….$30 for the tree, $75 for the delivery. Unless you’re buying a new dishwasher. Then it’s half price. A typical NYC bargain. So I enlisted someone to drive me out there. Not a single tree left. Some needles and a sign in the parking lot where they HAD BEEN.  It looked like December 27th.

In my hood they’ve got one of those stalls on Lexington… the wreaths and ribbons, the stand, the huge LED sign across the fence reminding us---canned corny Christmas music blaring from mounted speakers….trees divided by the little heated house—one side the Douglas firs and the cheapies…the other side the balsams…$100 and up. Around the corner a few rejects chained to a wooden post like old horses, waiting it out. The yellow-tags. A tall one in there… no branches in the mid-section, losing its needles—my kind of tree. I offer to take it off their hands. 'Seventy bucks,' the man with the graying ponytail informs me. He can see from my coat that I’m not bidding on a balsam, but he resents everyone in Manhattan. After all he’s wearing an orange jumpsuit and selling Christmas trees on a street corner. Inside the house the guys have ordered take-out. Sushi. I guess tips are good.

I turn and wait it out.

December 21. Actually December 22nd…2 AM. The reject pile is growing. It’s the coldest night of the year. Wind…freezing rain. The night shift is asleep in the pickup. My son suggested he could pick them off and no one would notice. I give him the look. They’re fucking TREES, he snaps. And somewhere he’s right. These are offerings of nature. Someone cut them down in their prime, and is now asking to be paid for such an offense. He should be punished.

But I’m still a buyer. And the guy knows I’m a beggar. I can’t use the ‘I’ll take it off your hands’ approach. I can’t imply it’s for a poor family who can’t afford it, because that’s the truth, and it’s for us.

I knock lightly on the cab window. The guy opens his eyes, rolls the window down about an inch. 'I told you yesterday,' his look says…'I can get $75 for that tree.' He is not getting out of a warm truck for the likes of me.

The overnight crosstown bus passes me…driver stops and calls out. Many nights he and I are alone on this bus when I come from work. He greets me… 'Would you be willing to let me on this bus with a tree?' 'Mama—for you? Anything!' he assures me. Merry Christmas.

I move on. The Second Avenue Subway-construction mess has pretty much wrecked business for the vendors there….but from a funky old bar, the smell of Christmas as a few college-aged kids spill out onto the street. They are heading uptown. I approach them…'Anybody know where I can buy a reasonable tree in this neighborhood?' 'Sure,' they say. 'Up around 104th. We’ll walk you.' So off we go uptown. They are from New Hampshire…good kids… at 101st they turn off and I’m on my own. The streets are deserted except a couple of homeless guys collecting cardboard and cans.

The blocks are long… across the street is the Projects…colored lights everywhere. I wonder if Benefit Cards buy trees. Lights. Anyway, at 103rd, I catch sight of a row of evergreen… tall, great trees… both sides of the sidewalk. A white guy with a southern accent in a grungy old parka comes out…a beard…my age…grey. Tall. I ask him about prices…$55, he tells me… $45 over here. Literally one fourth of the ones at Lexington. I pick out a 9-footer—- thin, but great bone structure. How about $40? 'Done,' he says. Merry Christmas. Saws off the end, wraps it up, and shows me how to balance it across my arms. If I can make it to the crosstown, I’m home free.

But this is tough work. Suddenly…across the street, I hear a rhythmic tapping sound in the silent night. There on the projects playground, a boy… 2:30 AM…in the freezing mist, the slippery pavement.. in sweats and a hoodie…his parka hooked onto the fence-links, shooting…dribbling… dodging… back and forth.. rebounding, hooking, weaving..around his invisible defender ..jumping… his breath in bursts of mist... Suddenly I had a jolt…—like the thrill might be gone everywhere… but here it is on this deserted,freezing icy 2 AM court. A kid, feeling the Kobe Bryant rush…..not a soul watching…...maybe he won’t make it but he is dreaming about it…... that feeling... 11 days off from school and it's the first night... and Christmas coming and you might get something.. Knicks tickets…Jordans. I could have stood there all night... but I had to carry my tree home.

And suddenly I had the strength of an old Atlas. With the scent of pine in my frozen nostrils, I walked back and all the way up the crosstown hill. Busdriver honked as he passed. I was home free, just like those dumb Walton old-style holiday films. Me and the tree. The kid and his basketball. Oh spirit of Santa, I think, as I drape my old strands of colored lights on my still freezing symbol of holiday and Vermont nature…bring that kid something good. Bring him a future-- a winning shot,--the never-ending dream of Christmas. Amen.