I walked outside after dark and it smelled like Christmas. Last year, coming home from a late dinner downtown, Thomas and I thought something was horribly wrong - up ahead a few blocks there was a parade of cop cars, sirens screaming and lights blurring colors, a visible emergency. It was just after midnight. We inched toward them, the familiar bystanders’ dance at a crisis, a nervous, obligated curiosity. Then the screaming cars roared past us, more slowly than we expected, and we saw that the darkness between them, taking up all three lanes on Columbus avenue, was a huge flatbed truck, the sort of vehicle used for logging, the kind you’d expect to see on a freeway, or driving through mountains. On the long bed of the truck, and even longer than it, hanging off it at a length and size that seemed to be approximately that of a city block, was one single gigantic, felled Christmas tree, a perfect picture-book triangle of trunk and fir branches. The truck tore on downtown, guarded by a blue and red constellation of threatening lights. The next day, I read that that year’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree had just arrived from upstate. We had witnessed the end of its long southbound journey out of mundanity and darkness. It was one more of the small, strange, lit up events the city offers, the tree like a hallucination, devoured by the darkening avenues, brought in to offer a visible reason to exclaim about something, the city inventing something upon which to rejoice.
cold
cold
cold
I walked outside after dark and it smelled like Christmas. Last year, coming home from a late dinner downtown, Thomas and I thought something was horribly wrong - up ahead a few blocks there was a parade of cop cars, sirens screaming and lights blurring colors, a visible emergency. It was just after midnight. We inched toward them, the familiar bystanders’ dance at a crisis, a nervous, obligated curiosity. Then the screaming cars roared past us, more slowly than we expected, and we saw that the darkness between them, taking up all three lanes on Columbus avenue, was a huge flatbed truck, the sort of vehicle used for logging, the kind you’d expect to see on a freeway, or driving through mountains. On the long bed of the truck, and even longer than it, hanging off it at a length and size that seemed to be approximately that of a city block, was one single gigantic, felled Christmas tree, a perfect picture-book triangle of trunk and fir branches. The truck tore on downtown, guarded by a blue and red constellation of threatening lights. The next day, I read that that year’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree had just arrived from upstate. We had witnessed the end of its long southbound journey out of mundanity and darkness. It was one more of the small, strange, lit up events the city offers, the tree like a hallucination, devoured by the darkening avenues, brought in to offer a visible reason to exclaim about something, the city inventing something upon which to rejoice.