The City is quiet, relatively empty for the holiday. Residents who can afford to have escaped to the Sierra, hoping for snow; or to the tropics, to work on their tans.
Chinatown alone was hopping last night; its restaurants filled mainly by Jewish families and atheists, as is the tradition here. We went to one such place ourselves, ordering duck, calamari, shrimp, chicken, green beans, Chinese broccoli, hot and sour soup, and so on.
Walking through the Mission on Christmas Day, we found buildings and corners we've seldom seen before. Somehow, they tended to stand out more noticeably in the silence. At major intersections, no car could be seen coming or going.
I was struck by a different memory -- and an even more profound silence. The supreme quiet of walking home on a wintry evening in Ann Arbor, at 2 a.m. after putting the next day's paper to bed. Snow would be falling soundlessly; the entire world was coated in white, my breath was similarly white, my winter shoes moved silently through the streets where no autos were moving.
I loved these nights, these moments of absolute solitude. They were my Robert Frost nights, the times when his poems came alive for me.
Back to the present tense, I decided to leave the Christmas tree's lights on for one last night. Bereft of presents now, this small pine is destined for the sidewalk tomorrow, where it will be retrieved and recycled by the city garbage company, the euphemistically named Sunset Scavengers.
Only they never come after sunset; instead they come at sunrise, their noisy trucks waking us prematurely, and we curse them, here in the country that wastes more products than any other as we live out our roles as consumers of junk, less than one percent of which lasts longer than six months!.
By day, I am studying Africa and sustainability. By night I am dreaming of those winter nights, so long ago and far awaay, when I was still largely innocent of these inconveient facts.
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