Dream Bridge

                         

1983

I cross this bridge even in my dreams, even during those two years it took them to rebuild it after a half century or more of neglect, this span of steel, asphalt and concrete that connects the place I chose to live with my ancestors who lived just across it on the other side, a haunted river flowing between us, shared in memory by all of us, as if all this was meant to be.

I knew almost nothing about them only the stories my mother used to tell, some of which she got from her mother, about how they all once lived in Garfield, and Lodi, and how like the old Bowery Boys movies grew up shoulder to shoulder with families that were unrelated then, but later became entwined by marriage and business, and how they all wandered down from Passaic Street on their side to fish in a river now too polluted now except for the homeless men who live in the woods behind Holy Rosary Church, and how all those surviving markers I recognize going over to that side were the icons of their lives, and how the house my great grandmother owned and in which my immediately family lived, stood at the crest of the hill where existed almost to the day I was born, torn down to make way for a Catholic School across from a street lined with factories and Mills which became like ancient ruins for a time, and taken over by the owners of Two Guys who built a store near them, and in which I eventually worked for at time.

This bridge ripped up to its ribs to expose its rusting steel with nothing but brown surging water beneath, our side bequeathed the rats and roaches and junk cars, with chemical plant factories spewing green liquid down into the water from concrete pipes, while dead fish float at the bridge's feet, low water showing its roots like rotting teeth-- a few web-backed carp struggling at the foot of reeds, scavenging the remains of their bretheran, bones of both rising with the morning froth as barefooted children wade across in their rush to school.

This bridge I need to exist in whole so I can keep connected with that side of memories I remember only through the memory of my mother and grandmother, made real that week I brought my mother north for the holidays before they tore the bridge up, and she pointed out what she remembered there, the theater turned into a warehouse, the bank turned into an auto store, the gas station still a gas station though no longer with 10 cents a gallon gas, and those things still the same, the polish stores, the post office, the rail line from Hoboken to Bergen County passing over with a schedule still regular enough to predict, the sewing stores, and the corner store where my mother marched as a kid in the annual memorial day parade where she stopped for soda or candy when they had a few pennies to spare, and she struggling to remember exactly where the old store was and the house over and around it in which her father and brothers took refuge during the worst of the great depression, where her grandmother made great plans for her life but died before any of these could be realized, where her two eldest brothers fought against street gangs with fists and sticks, coming home bloody but victorious, and, of course, beyond this, down at the furthest end of this street, beyond the dream bridge, and the dream landscape, and the pantheon of memories, the graveyard where her father’s father and his father before him rest in peace in tombs so grand I lose my breath each time I walk among them, me the dream-ghost reverently coming to them, humbled by the fact that I exist and that they helped make me, and how I ache for this bridge they have torn apart to be rebuilt so I can remain connected.