The day starts at 5:25 with strong coffee and my will to live. It is significantly colder today and our Christmas lights are the last ones twinkling on the street. We allow them to stay lit until the end of Three Kings’ Day on the 6th of January and until the wee hours of the morning on the 7th. Now, Christmas is officially over.

I remind my husband that I get home later than he does in the evening, and that he is not to turn them on again. We have to make the break sometime. One of my fears in life is becoming the neighbor with twinkling holiday lights still glowing in spring air crowded up against the beginning of a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration. My husband sighs and says, “I know what I have to do, Pusha”. I breathe a sigh of relief.

The holidays are delicious, grand, overwhelming and with each passing year…more exhausting than imaginable. I am tired. My neighbors and family are tired. The city of Rochester is tired.

I am reading a collection of writings by the famed author C. S. Lewis. He reminds me this early dark morning that we are on the outside of what is real; we are in fact, on the wrong side of the door. I know I am on the wrong side of the door. Somedays I am not even certain I know where the door is. More times than not, I am stuck in the garage. I try to find a way out. I stare at large gray metal shelf units stuffed with the detritus of suburban life; half empty bags of grass and flower seed, bottles waiting to be recycled or returned to Wegmans to get money back, empty flower pots promising spring and color and the rich smell of earth and rain along with back breaking yard work. I note my floppy tea hat worn annually at high tea at Niagara on the Lake and wonder why it is in the garage and not a drawer in our bedroom. I see various lids, rakes and brooms, instructions for the grill…used paint sticks and a can of primer. The wrong side of the door indeed.

The coffee is extra strong this morning; a dark roasted whole bean…Chautauqua Blend, named in honor of our grand Chautauqua Institute…a Christmas gift from a family member. It’s the zing I need to load up the car and to be out the door by 6:45.
About ten minutes before I reach the school, I stop at the red light at the corner of East Main Street, and in close proximity to Grove and Gibbs Streets. There is a bus stop where I often see homeless persons congregating early in the morning. Sometimes they sleep restlessly, wrapped up in black garbage bags or old, tatty blankets. Sometimes they sit silently, looking down at their feet or staring vacantly out at moving traffic. Today there is only one man. He is tall and thin with his legs crossed and he is turned sideways facing the direction of the large garbage bin which rests within the confines of the heated bus stop. The whole garbage unit has somehow been cemented down by the city and there is a large beige colored cement lip jutting off the edge of the bin.

Since this red light remains red for a good while, I turn my eyes away from the traffic ahead of me and watch this man. He reaches down into the bin and pulls out something which I can’t quite see. He places it carefully, so gently on the ledge of the cement lip and stares at it for a moment. I look at the light and then back at him. He uncrosses his legs, turns to a bag resting on the bench where he is seated and pulls out a plastic bottle of what appears to be water. He sets this carefully on the edge of the lip, to the left of the object I can’t discern. There is a rhythm and an art to his procedure. This is elegance in the midst of chaos and abject failure. I am fascinated, drawn in, hoping that the light holds red. Then this homeless man, in his tattered clothing, picks up his plastic bottle, gently salutes the object sitting on the edge and takes a sip. What is he saluting? To whom has he offered this silent cheer, this salutation in the fresh New Year? What does he really see and what is he remembering on this cold and dank day in Rochester at the very beginning of the new decade?.

The light flashes green and the car behind me beeps impatiently. I take a last quick glance and move on. I have witnessed the story of humanity at the edge of Grove and Gibbs on East Main Street. Whether in post Christmas gray or in the greening of June, we are all trying to create elegance, restoration and beauty from the wrecks, both big and small of what lies all around us. We continually salvage the remnants of what remains in difficult circumstances. This is the definition of hope. Beauty from the ashes. Memories of a long forgotten New Year’s Eve in what may have been much better times years ago. The only difference between that man in the bus stop and myself is that I am safely in a car and that my heavy woolen scarf smells richly clean. Other than that, each of us has reached the similar conclusion. We are on the wrong side of the door and we try day after day to gain a glimpse of the other side of the door with its restoration, beauty, order and elegance.

I pull into the snowy parking lot at work and observe the blinking lights of the two rows of buses filled with more than a thousand children who are streaming out and heading into the building. I hear the bus matron with her raggedy and loud voice yelling over and over, “Let ’em out, let ’em out”.

We reach the depth of winter. The days and hours after the Christmas season and the minutes and seconds left to me before the work world begins again are sleepy, gray, driving me to an unaccustomed Saturday afternoon nap. The whipped up celebration of the New Year is finished and what is left is collective exhaustion. I recognize the beginning of our desire to hibernate.
We choose to live within a geography where the four seasons are firmly set; changing on alternate dates and with varying degrees of ferocity, but changing nonetheless and we forget that we must change with them. Entering quiet hiatus after riotous celebration is an art form.
We approach our local store, the large Wegmans which sits solidly along the length of Calkins Road with the huge Christmas wreath still hanging on bravely, braced up against snow flurries and steady wind. The parking lot is packed full and finding a good parking spot proves difficult. Everyone it seems, our neighbors, the mailman, the football fan, the single parent and the grave and elderly have the same purpose; loading up on staples, milk and bread, stopping briefly to look at all the holiday candy on sale and then walking away. The front sidewalks of the store are naked, bereft of trees, holiday wreathes and netted bags of scented pinecones. The damp sidewalk, puddled and wet, frozen and muddy seeps through my shoes and rims the black soles with gunk.
We get two carts and separate because he is interested in buying fruits and vegetables and I am looking for survival food for work. In a very few minutes, I realize I’m not prepared to be out; to be making decisions of any kind. I feel the accumulative effects of weeks of Christmas indulgence. The music in the store has changed; gone back to some unrecognizable theme. The lighting looks gray and filmy. After hundreds of hours of sparkle and gold and red and silver, the fluorescent lights hang heavily over me and the cereal aisle is discouraging. I roll past the shelf packed with laundry soap and notice that someone has discarded a bag of whole wheat bagels in between two containers at the far end. I experience a sudden nauseating image of bagels and soap and I head directly for a chair strategically placed between the frozen vegetables case and the front end of the paper products aisle. Placing my left arm on the handle of my cart to keep it from rolling away, I stretch out my legs and phone my husband.
“I’m in the chicken section”, he says in a rather sing song voice. “Where are you?” “I’m sitting in front of the frozen pizza case, to the left of the frozen vegetable section and to the right of the paper products aisle”. “That’s rather specific” he chuckles. “It’s part of my charm” I respond. “I know right where you are. Sit tight” he says happily.
I look around and think to myself that sitting tightly is exactly what I plan to do. I shift more deeply into the chair and watch other customers. Today is a big Buffalo Bills game and there are large numbers of people sporting the cheery hats, sweats and jerseys.
I check to see that my wallet is still in the cart. I close my eyes and consider a bizarre dream I had early in the morning involving me, my sister and baby niece. In the dream, we attempt to drive over the Canadian border on our way to Niagara on the Lake with a licensed and loaded gun in the Jeep. Somehow the woman driving ahead of us knows about it and lets the guard at the checkpoint know. The guard, a polite and attractive female, politely climbs into the front of the Jeep and gives us a careful lecture about how this is not allowed and didn’t we know better? She is wonderfully polite and carefully Canadian. I am flustered that I cannot make my sister understand that we are in trouble. I’m not sure why we are all in the back seat. Then, I wake up.
I open my eyes and watch an extremely old woman in a special driving cart making her way slowly down the paper products aisle toward me. She is hunched over and continually looks up at a tall, young man who is either a relative or a caregiver. She questions item after item as to price and he repeats the price, bending over so she can see his face and hear him. She tells the young man she can get better prices somewhere else.
I know I can’t possibly be as tired as she is. She is really old, appearing similar to photos from mid nineteenth century; perhaps a grainy daguerreotype? Despite prices and personal appearance, she seems spunky. She smiles as they make a wide berth around the area where I sit, maneuvering her cart carefully and they head in the direction of the checkout. I stand up and go to meet my husband who is speeding around the corner having apparently laid waste to the produce section. His cart brims with health. I look at my cart and decide I’m done for now.

I only have energy to write now. I am spent, irritated from worrying about what will happen on Monday when our district starts back up. There are so many unanswered questions about financial issues, test scores and report cards, displaced teachers and layoffs. I can’t manage to fully understand any of it. Everything bad happened mid year; a sort of bursting of waste from an entrenched bureaucracy. It is the worst time for a thousand reasons and one of those reasons is our geography and our climate. Cold and damp don’t aid quality rallying and fighting and exertion. It is supposed to be the time to hibernate, to take a long hiatus and to recover over cold winter days; and to teach well. But that luxury isn’t allotted us now. Not in Rochester. Not at this time. We bend to paralysis and set our caps against January winds.