Monday, December 7, 2015

New Testament in Concrete~Story.

photograph by Asher Ovadiah


       New Testament 
        in
   Concrete



One afternoon I dropped my quarters as I tried to insert them in the box for the paper, outside of Sal Reznick's Kosher Deli. Bending over to pick up my runaway coins, I saw what looked like hieroglyphics carved in the sidewalk.

A newsstand had rested on this place with the best yellow journalism in town for sale. The stand with its green fold up walls and the old guy with the change purse on his hip, had been replaced by a squadron gaily colored plastic and stamped steel newspaper racks.

Intrigued I walked back to Sal's and grabbed some napkins and a tall glass of Hudson River water to go, and began to clean the carefully chiseled words. At first they appeared as Cuneiform, or Hieratic script covered up in city soot and pyroclastic flows of chewed bubble gum. Confused signals of age in the epoch of acid rain.

Perplexed at first, I squatted before the dispensers of global knowledge as if I were some sort neo-savage from a dystopian future.Clarity came with careful applications of water sprinkled then wiped into the carved letters. Freeing up the microscopic flotsam and jetsam of time long since past.

I read: “On this corner I first saw you and fell in love.-Aug ‘47”

After ten minutes of careful digging more became visible. All the while the voices of college professors from classes long slept through, began screaming in my ear, " Need to be careful! Document everything!" or "You are destroying information!" rang like Mynabirds uselessly repeating the same lines over and over again, in my head, until it became a solid hum in between my ears.

In the same hand, I read the next line, “I proposed to you on this corner. Aug ‘49.”

The lettering appeared to fade downward like a beach meeting the sea. I had to go back inside to get more water and this time I grabbed a handful of toothpicks. Carefully I worked through a minute archaeological scale of accumulated junk, which had almost reconstituted itself into a new form of stone. I thought to myself, this must be what Schliemann must have felt like when digging up Troy.


Finally the poured stone revealed, “Isaac, Sarah and Jacob you gave to me.- ‘50, ‘53 and ‘59.”

Then what I thought was maybe age, palsy or grief etched the final lines into the pavement. 


“You left me at this corner, to prepare a seat for me in the hall of our Lord.- ‘01. Let this be my Shem-Mem-Resh, I keep my commandments,."

A life lived in four lines. With all the world to fill in the blanks. I wondered what did the all the years between look like? Did their children grow and prosper
? What about the birthdays, weddings, babies born or like any New Yorker did the writer see the end of the Twin Towers?

Then it hit me. Maybe the writer wrote down the pure essential highlights from his life. Then I thought I saw a line or an arrow pointing toward a new set of carvings. I was busy trying to wash the sidewalk when a police officer tapped me on my shoulder with his night stick.

"Hey buddy, wanna to explain to me why you are washing the sidewalk with them dirty napkins?" Officer Trujillo asked in perfect Brooklyn diction.


I said, I had found an interesting bit of urban history, a bit of local narrative sitting here in hidden in plain sight. I showed him the carved sidewalk, and he pushed his cap back on his head as leaned in and read what I had found. I told him I thought there was more but I couldn't tell as the sun was going down and I needed more light.

Officer Trujillo,-Marty as he introduced himself to me said, "This was Julius Myers News Stand for over fifty years. His wife had breast cancer. She fought it as long as she could. When I was a rookie he would always have cup of coffee waiting for me when I worked the graveyard shift, before Sal's would open he would be sitting in his stand reading a novel or playing a game of chess with someone he knew by mail. He closed down my second year walking my beat."

Marty shined his light on the carvings and indeed there was an arrow scratched into the concrete. We followed it, and it terminated underneath a New York Times box.

Officer Marty, pushed on the box and it moved over enough to where we could see the faint carved letters beneath the concrete pad the newspaper box was anchored to.

I started brushing off the dirt. Grabbed the last bit of water and poured it over the sidewalk. The final chapter was carved deeply into the sidewalk with a younger man's hand.

"West. 42nd Street is so much more than a boulevard of intersections. Fifty four years of marriage, three children with six grandchildren a family has carved their heart's history making their covenant to remember.”

The End.

DS Baker.

"The El" a reworking for Myrlindo

Image courtesy of
http://www.brujoinca.com/



"The El"

Happy were nights when trees shadowed by moonlight
gave no residence to ghostly visitors

Joyous moments when passing from waking into
Orpheus's gentle embrace
personal pestilence of ghosts
did not
plague me

Those moments were longed for
yearned for
making me an
addict searching
for my daily
fix

Terrible were nights
when my dead perched in skeletal trees
shrieking
their harpy scorn

These were the nights when
I, me, the el, senor Brujo
would have such long
discourses
As to make
parliamentarians weep

My dead and their wants
desires
cry's pitiful
for
one more moment
of life's extension
could not
would not
suffice

Yet they would flock to me
seeking
absolution
past sins
angry at living souls for living
when they
could not

Only to be sated with stories of the living
and the lived
To be forgotten their true fearful hell

As nights would wind
coil relentlessly forward
they would
eventually drift

Drift towards
some forgotten abattoir
after spending the night wanting, and needing
to hide once more from living truth

I, me, myself,  the el, senor Brujo would hasten stumbling steps
with poems from poets
long mouldering
in their own
graves imbued with magical powers
of verse

sharing those captured moments
illusive rare
sating my dead's desires

Worry lines would ease
as I would read Cervantes
No matter the eve's wearing presence
upon my brow

To be a gallant
about a lady's honor
was a fine
fiction

In daily repose
regain strength
for another eve of
relentless bickering

I, me, the el, senor Brujo
resting my soul
in
Sancho Panza's care

Dreaming
until needed
once
more...

-Fin-

DS Baker.