White seems to be the prevalent light of choice this
Christmas on my street, flattening the already colorless landscape of one- and
two-story houses that are the homes of my, for lack of a better word, neighbors.
Those abodes with no lights are lost in the night, holes of dark mystery,
widows, single mothers, students, but the rest, the yards of the
Christmas regalia, have been brought to thin brightness by someone,
some family with no shape or soul, just some cold white lights on a creepy, leafless bush.
Around the corner, in front of a closed bar, looking down
into the gutter, Jim, our brave local who stumbles here and there on our one city
block, looks thin and pale and glassy-eyed, the cold night a mere
inconvenience, or less, a trifle. Night is the wrong time to be sober, the
wrong time to be forgetting where he lives. He sees color in the oil spills and
the rubber streaks of foreign cars that have driven by, he sees pale greens and
wet orange glistenings, he sees shapes like single-celled watery creatures under a
microscope, he sees his own watery soul under the concrete. He lights an old
cigarette and drops the lit match into the abyss.
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