T’is Christmas time again

 

 

December 22, 1980

 

The rush is on.

Cars, trucks and buses bang across the short Wall Street Bridge for the two hundred foot trip from Garfield to Passaic.

On both sides of the sluggish river, life stirs as stores open for business.

Sad and weary store owners scramble to change labels or create sales.

The river changes, too.

Long sheets of breaking ice ride high in the water. One man claims it must have rained up state.

We stare over the bridge rail as if viewing the passing of ships.

Where they go no one knows, down stream to Newark Bay, I supposed, if they find no snag along the way.

The sun oozes through a hazy sky, winking through thin clouds like a search light might through fog

Winter ducks quack at us from under the arch, their voices echoing in competition to the rumbling trucks behind us.

The duck ease out with the flow, dots tucked between the sheets of ice like mis-colored pieces broken off, though their movement is more deliberate, each a little tugboat struggling through the slew of barge, their gazes locked for the least clue of possible food.

They search the shores – the edge of which is lost under the ice so it is difficult to tell where land ends and water starts, though the line of trees gives some clue. The quacking seems desperate, part of that enraged hunger only this time of season can inspire, each animal calling for the return of summer, unaware of the long, cold months yet ahead before even spring begins.

Perhaps mockingly, sea gulls yell as they swoop over us and the ducks, these more accustomed to these seasons as their gray bodies blend with the gray sky as if to make them invisible as well.

They might well be phantoms, or hungry demons that sweep down at the surface for food even the ducks can’t see, crying away with a cry and then a swallow only to circle again.

If the gulls notice us, the ice or the ducks, they do not show it, perhaps seeing us only as minor obstacles in this fight for survival, something to get around, complaint about, dump on, but not to fear.

They rise and fall with the wind while we only shiver.

Again, the ice move, so white against the brown water these chunks seem pure when they are not, bumping against the bowed over reeds or roots of the water-hungry trees.

In the shallows, along the far side, a silver fish flops into the open area, drawing a flutter of gull and duck wings and a scramble to reach the rippling circles in the water’s surface first.

These beasts collect their Christmas presents early and unwrapped, and seem content, unaware of the jangle of the church bells nearby or the stumbling humbled parishioners making their way through the Christmas shoppers.

Me? Standing there in the cold with the church to one side of me and the river to the other, I wonder which is the holier place.