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”.
690 Saint Paul 