A hike to Times Square and back

The Column: 01.04.23

The enemy is clutter and I am late to the battle, not wanting to be prim and proper, but I have bags and boxes stuffed with stuff, drawers, shelves, closets, and this must be addressed, otherwise you’ll be reading about me in the paper, Elderly Author Starves in Home, Unable to Climb Over Piles to Reach Kitchen. I exaggerate but the trend is clear and trends that are not interrupted become landslides. Meaningless memorabilia, clothes we’ve outgrown, mysterious tools, ugly art. So I start tossing and then I come across a note from my daughter: “I love you, Show Boy” and of course I can’t throw that away, and so it goes to a pile of saves, along with a sheet of paper with one-liners ( “She was only a stableman’s daughter but all the horsemen knew her.”). And a picture of my classmates standing on my lawn for our 60th reunion, which prompted me to call up Billy Pedersen who’s in the picture, and because my wife was asleep, I slipped out of the apartment and so there I was, walking down Columbus Avenue and reminiscing about our friend Corinne and the toboggan hill behind her house and thus housekeeping was put off for another day.

It’s Christmas, after all. Lighten up. Give yourself a break. — That’s my feeling. My mother didn’t teach us about a strict St. Nicholas who would judge us children and leave a lump of coal in the stockings of kids who’d not met the mark; she accepted the jolly old uncle St. Nick who wished to fulfil our dreams and desires, the one that Clement Clarke Moore of New York wrote up in his poem. The Swedes and Norwegians back in Minnesota came from people who believed in the nisse, the elf who needed to be bribed with a bowl of rice pudding and it needed to be sweet and creamy and up to his standards and even if it was, he might, out of pure meanness, leave ashes under your tree.

Three versions of Santa: judgmental, generous, or a jokester. The generous Santa is the saint of retail Christmas and the Calvinist in me sees him as a judge but these days I’m leaning toward the jokester — it’s the Santa who makes sense to me. I had a good job for fifty years that kept me amused and involved no meetings around a long table discussing long-term goals and required no math and no social skills on my part, and I married a kind and funny woman who is skilled at reading instruction manuals and jiggering appliances to make them work. And five months ago my leaky mitral valve was replaced by one from a pig and it is working very well. I am one of the undeserving blessed — my rice pudding was an instant microwave pudding in a box and the nisse was feeling bloated from heavy creamy puddings and my 2 percent skim struck him as a relief and so I won the prize of an easy life. That’s my position and I’m sticking to it.

I take the B train down to 42nd Street thinking I’ll go to the library but instead I walk through Times Square where the crowd gathered on the 31st to watch the lighted ball drop. I stand on the corner where Broadway slices at a steep angle across 44th and Seventh Avenue and I can look up six different canyons of brilliant flashing signs and along the sidewalks rivers of people moving along.

And then it comes back to me, the memory of Times Square in 1953, I was eleven, on a trip with my father. My mother made him take me. It was the trip of all trips — the towers of Manhattan silvery in the afternoon sun and I had my father all to myself for the one and only time in my life. He’d been stationed in the city during World War II, sorting mail at the post office. He was talking about the wonderful time he’d had, a man in uniform, theaters letting him see shows for free, and I wandered away from him in this Square and he ran and grabbed my hand, afraid of losing me, and I remember this clearly — knowing that my dad loved me. He’d never say it, of course, but he did.

I stand for a moment, stunned by the memory of him pulling me back, and then the light changes and I head for home.