Singing about the Christ baby and the red-nosed deer

I stood in the outer lobby of the Slingerlands Price Chopper, wearing a red apron, ringing the small bell and singing a cappella every Christmas carol and song I know, getting louder as I got comfortable. Lot's of great interaction with odd Bethlehem people (Ah, Bethlehem), lot's of fun and funny looks. One woman stopped to sing some of "Rudolph" with me, her face very close to mine, grinning a toothless grin. A burly guy in his 40s said, "I like a man who takes his job seriously," and put $5 into the red pot, and then fist-pumped with me and went on his grocery way. Another woman in her '50s told me a story about being separated from her mother when she was little, on Pearl Street shopping at Whitney's; her mother panicked, called the police, and the little girl was found outside the store with Salvation Army Santa, ringing his golden bell. Several old and frail women thanked me for singing and smiled sadly, and at least two young men with drawn brows and poor clothes avoided eye-contact as they put in their money, and then said "God Bless" under their breath, for which I was grateful.

Export Agency

At the office on the 10^th floor, he has a cubicle in which he speaks German on the phone with customers from New South Wales, talking novelties and the wiring of brassieres, reassuring them of consignations on the Upper West Side the evening after they fly into LaGuardia. Then, on his lunch hour, he balances on the fire escape behind the office and smokes Parliaments and sweats under his white collars and white armpits and his face is  red as always with blood pressure and as he stares across the empty lot at the hundreds of windows facing him from the back of the Martha Washington Hotel for Women he thinks of the future. He will work later tonight, wait for Mabel at the phones to leave, wait for the owner Mr. Jamias the Greek owner to leave, wait for the surly, pregnant bookkeeper Maria recently from Naples to leave, lock the doors from the inside, change his clothes in his cubicle from his grey suit into a blue Mohair turtleneck and a pink cap (a new addition), watch the numbers descend in the elevator with his eyes almost closed, stop at Henry's in the lobby for a fresh pack of cigarettes, step out onto the street and stroll around Park Avenue South between 30th and 31^st Street, smoking and breathing in the evening dew and the smell of chicken fat wafting out from the doors of the Bellmore Cafeteria, where lines of cabbies on their break with their Vacant signs off will be queued up along the sidewalk for the best chopped liver sandwich in town.

Albany's Hudson

Look at the river. It laughs at the city, “You should do my bidding, there is no crossing me, your bridges will collapse, catch fire, erode and be swallowed, my beauty requires no beholder, make your choices better, love the river's edge, the river bed, the river who brings you to the other side, to the road to the ocean, the nearer you are to me, your homes on a sloping hill sliding down to my shore, your windows rising to the sun off my waters, your children’s eyes closed, their faces breathing in the fresh grass, the lush lawns, the ancient rails, the paths to the past, when the earth, the homeland, the water’s edge, the wise old ancestors, lived alongside me, peaceably allowing time to pass as it will so richly, until you sweetly pass on.”

The beginning of December

She took a walk, just to the corner, where Helderberg met New Scotland. It was cold, she had her favorite mittens, white and silky, like skin, like milk, and her comic bonnet which she knew made her a character on the street with the lads, which is what she called the schoolboys, the Ormond’s twins. If they weren’t in school they’d be laughing innocently behind her back. If she had had children, they’d be about as old as the lads were now, fifth graders. In the fall, on the first day at School 19, she always found a reason to take a walk, if it wasn’t raining too hard, and she’d follow right behind the lads, walking on either side, hand in hand, with their daddy, who walked too fast for them and rushed them along the sidewalk. She’d want to pick one up, it didn’t matter which, they were identical, and whisper in his ear, mind your daddy, move those little feet, it’s a big day for you, but just another day for him. She could see their lives rolling out in front of them, from this day forth, growing into strapping lads, Albany lads, firemen, maybe, or policemen with good girls as girlfriends and then wives. Her lads. Right now they were in school, old Miss Thompson’s class, same teacher as she had oh, twenty years ago. Same room even, next to the library, first floor, seat by the window looking out at the flagpole, unable to concentrate, thinking, it’s December, only 17, 16, 15, more days ‘til Christmas Eve. Now she hated Christmas Eve almost as much as Christmas Day. 17, 16, 15, more days to go, passionately grateful it would be over, she could get back to little walks to the corner, warm enough with her fur-lined white coat, her bonnet, and her favorite mittens, silky like skin, her husband would have said, back then.

Shutters

These 30 years our lines connect our roofs, we share electric power and our words cross through the wires, yet we just wave to each other from our driveways, she once young and soft with babies, their father then coming and going as he pleased. I can't recall having heard the sound of her voice, and her shutters reveal no lights from within, but her grandchildren laughing sweetly on Saturdays jumping into her car are clearly the dearest children in the world.

A normal retired Monday

The house is quiet, the furnace is temporarily silent, the only sounds the dog’s footsteps following up stairs, down stairs, her nails clicking against the hallway’s wooden floors. The computer dings that you have a new e-mail. You're waiting, thinking objects may come alive at any moment, the yellow walls start to shimmer, a bust of Beethoven begins to smile and frown, an angel painted on a bowl sinks and soars, three figures that were drawn last night, a pleading woman in the foreground, two men behind her, left and right, begin to dance in place, a stone Pisces holding up books moves its lips, bats its eyes, the floral prints on the carpet spin like a kaleidoscope, the pillow in the dog’s bed curls and moves in a dream in its sleep. The phone rings five times, your voice calls out from the answering machine please, please leave a message, and then the house is quiet again, quieter. So used to voices and radios and airplanes and barking neighborhood dogs, all that resonance; the quiet and the aloneness, the old songs in your hollow head are deafening. Outside, the mail is suddenly dropped in the creaking box by following and preceding footsteps; someone should oil its hinges; there are no messages in the box, no sounds, no breath or movement closing in from the past or inching towards the future; just two thin bright shiny circulars and a water bill.

The Price Chopper

She’s the girl with tired skin who’s always there at Price Chopper with her smart face and with her grocery store air. It says: This is where I belong, who my family is, for what it’s worth, this is more like my home than any home I’ve had, here on Sunday after Thanksgiving, making myself useful. She’s not particularly friendly to the customers—the worried dark-haired girl with an infant in a carrier in her shopping cart, the bent-over scowling thin crab of a woman slowly following her adult daughter through the aisles, the thick hard man in his mid-thirties, wearing tight large rugby clothes, his hands in fists, his head darting here and there, me, a real regular old fart in glasses and jeans and dirty cap, just hoping as I always do for someone who’ll make eye contact. No, she’s locked into her world where she belongs, locked into the aisles and the counters and the vegetable bins spraying water over her hands fussing over the broccoli, locked into gossip with the jawing woman arranging flowers in the florist cubicle, telling in-jokes to the manager in produce with the headset to her ears, her small manager eyes darting here and there and her pouty dry lips snapping orders into a mouthpiece, rushing on tiptoe to soothe the flush-faced general manager who is also talking to a headset and knitting his brows with his greased hair and starched-white shirt and shiny orange tie that matches his complexion. But finally, my smart-faced girl ends up cashing out my mother-in-law at the register, whom I’ve known half-a-century, who is slowing these last few years but still a-twinkle, making people stop for a moment so the girl who has ignored me and others all these months with her smart face and grocery store air and in-jokes, on this Sunday after Thanksgiving relaxes, stops for a moment and smiles when my clever mother-in-law asks her name: “Molly,” she says and we all twinkle, just for a moment.