If You Ever Go To New Haven Town... (New Years, Part One)

New Years Day is bizarre: Advertised universally on the menu as a Friday, only containing all the taste of Sunday, with Wednesday preparation and brought to your table with a garnish of Monday.

Perhaps it's because it marks the transition away from Christmas and into that cold, grayish gulag that precedes Spring here in the Northeast. No longer the brightly lit, multi-colored gulag that inspires giving and peace on Earth, it is rather characterized by another set of grim sense experiences: blistering cold, a deadened landscape (at least in southern CT), eight hours of maximum sunlight, the abrasive screech of a rusted timing belt quiet enough to ignore in the warmer weather, and subsequent daydreams of the west coast.

It's the period our intrepid leaders in government tried to render a bit warmer by forming the uneasy pact with greeting card companies that resulted in the flop we know as Valentines Day. With little else to do, they took the only remaining logical measure, and turned seasonal authority over to more capable hands; thus scapegoating a little earth-dwelling rodent.

This past Friday night I spent my January 1st, like I often spend many nights, walking around downtown New Haven, Connecticut.

It's nothing new, as I said, I do this often: ditching the car on any one of the city's many streets, following eyes, nose and ears returning again having found whatever it was I was looking for that day.

I weave through block after block, down one-way streets and around corners, tracing the squares in the city's grid like a wayward pencil across graph paper.

There's Chapel Street, the Yale Rep to my left, York Street to the right. Edging past the Yale dormitories I'm occasionally warmed by the steamy, sweet-smelling run-off from the laundry rooms.

Out onto Broadway where students, and other pedestrians, homeless and non-homeless alike congregate in front of the lit thoroughfare where I spend my workday. Here one can, among other things, shop American, urban, organic or eat a smart hamburger. Farther down York I listen in on the drum-beats, baselines and solos echoing from Toad's Place, and beyond...

Friday, New Years, was of course dead; a blanket of black silence speckled with the iodized glow of street lights was all that greeted me on my circuit. Cafes and restaurants were naturally closed, the storefronts dark, and the Yale students and faculty that typically litter the streets were now gone, many having left in a dusty trail of completed exams, coffee cups, and old textbooks; the wake of an old semester.

I turn down High Street and make my way towards Chapel. A lone Starbucks on the corner provides the only light in a row of darkened buildings. It's moderately full inside and as I peer in, I catch a few vacant stares.

Ah. Forgive me. Monkey had to use the john, and the Organ grinder's in the shop, ya see...

I shuffle past a quiet Payne-Whitney Gym, deserted and dark save for a single orange light by the big, old wooden doors.

(Not the actual way in, which is like a long cave entrance off to the side, currently sheathed in blue construction tarp and scaffolding-an industrial alternative to Lewis Carroll)

Vertically plastered along the building's old bricks are pictures of various Yale athletes, male and female frozen forever in mid lay-up; slapshot; forehand; volley. Each has its own torch-like spotlight underneath it, and for a minute, as corny as it sounds I'm reminded of Greek ruins. A pantheon empty, save for the echoes of rubber sole's screech on parquet, the violent crash of torsos on hardened mats and the thud of racket balls, overpowered then by a ravenous Yale crowd, blood-drunk for Harvard red.

The windows of Audubon Street, the arts district of New Haven and daily a defiant fist-pump in the direction of anything under the Yale fine arts umbrella, are a dark void.

Standing at the end of Grove Street I listen to the steady thrush of traffic, peering out onto State at the broken line of bright headlights. I guess in some weird way it reminds me a river. A river slowly but surely murdering the ozone, but still, a river.

Wall Street is especially lonely. A kind of Sleepy Hollow that cuts under a stone archway and into part of the Yale campus at one end that is accessible only on foot, and with a student ID. The President of Yale parks his vehicle in a private garage down here. It's awfully small to accommodate anything I imagine him driving though, like a hover car powered by Dark-Matter, or at the very least an M1 Tank with a rabid bull-dog stamped on the side.

It's here that a strange feeling overtakes me. It's as though wind, the sand it blows down the cracked concrete, the dull honk of cars in the distance, and the dim electrical buzzing of the streetlights mingles with the steady beat of my own footsteps to produce some weird night time score.

I stop.

Old words written by Patrick Kavanaugh ebb and flow through my mind:

"On Pembroke Road,
Look out for my ghost-
Disheveled, with shoes untied..
Playing
Through the railings
With little children-
Whose children have long since
Died..."

Everything becomes so acute and internal then, the way it gets, I think, while under water. Time becomes fluid and for whatever space of that moment, I actually wonder if I'm still capable of speaking.

I take to walking more briskly now on Elm Street, around the perimeter of the New Haven Green, the blue fiber optics of the city's Christmas tree softly glowing toward its center.

I come eventually to the Quad-section out in front of Broadway that's divided by a commuter lot and am given the option to continue my current course, or take one of three new ones:

DIXWELL? WHALLEY? GOFFE?

The first three were Puritan judges. Elm, last I checked, was of course, a type of tree...

Choose your destiny...