Time Capsule of our lives

Friday, February 14, 2020

I went back to the old neighborhood yesterday having did my 6-month ritual with the dentist in Fairfield.

Remarkably Little Falls has changed very little over the six decades or more from that time when we spent time there.

It was rainy and cold and gray so perfect to fit the mood I was in.

I wanted to rediscover some of the iconic places I remembered and see what was really there.

This included the bridge over the Passaic River where we filmed that movie back I guess in 1975  where Jimmy did his best to be Walter Cronkite or some other prominent reporter and I got to be the criminal that gets busted for the scam because I had a real criminal record and was typecast.

The section of bridge where we actually did the filming had been replaced overtime but there was still a portion of the old bridge further on nearer the canal, and I still remember Jimmy standing there talking about the crime I had committed and pointed to the falls as my means of transport.

The historic train station where my fictional arrest took place was still there all though fancied up since then and now part of a complex transportation system will used by young professionals to make their way to New York City every day.

The brick building looked the same; so, did the lobby but it all looked less abandoned than it did when I was arrested in the name of film.

I think someone saw me taking pictures of the building and called the police because the police car suddenly appeared out of nowhere looking at me suspiciously as I drove off to explore more of the old neighborhood.

I have driven through Little Falls in recent times sometimes stopping off at the Morris Canal Park to look at the Falls there.  But I had only gotten glimpses in passing of the institutions that played role in my young days.

It was cold and rainy when I park the car near the park and crossed over to that place where Jimmy and I sat after our marathon shore experience in the Summer of 69.

I was thrilled to see that the World War 1 tank still stood where it had when we were last there.  Jimmy and his gang used to sit on it and smoke pot and dump roaches inside of it.  They used to joke about filling it up with roaches and then later pined over the possibility of breaking into it when pot was short in supply. They figure they might re-roll all the roaches they dumped inside.

Because of the rain it was hard to linger there, and I took cover under some relatively new wooden structures built over to stone icons that were the foundation pieces of that little village.

The rusted park bench Jimmy and I sat on to wait for my bus to go back to the other end of Paterson was gone but they were marble replacements lingering nearby.

What I never noticed then and what struck me very hard now was the Time Capsule that  I didn't notice them but stood out prominently in the rain, a time capsule installed in April 1968 just about the time Frank and I first came there to get him a job at the Little Falls laundry, the event that started my whole journey through life with Jimmy and the gang.

It seemed to me that it was our time capsule preserving something special and that it would be there to be reopened long after all of us had passed on.

From there I took the stroll down East Main Street to where it dipped and then started to rise up the Long Hill to great notch. Everything seemed stretched out and distance is greater than my memory had made them.  And I understood for the first time why Jimmy constantly manipulated Ralph into driving him around this was not a place you could easily walk around in and get any place fast.

The laundromat where I had spent the night while working in Little Falls laundry was gone replaced by Dunkin Donuts with another similar laundromat facility a few doors down in the same strip mall with a Quick Chek  Jimmy would have loved had it been there when we were kids.

The massive brick edifice that was once the Little Falls laundry still stood there though now subdivided into other uses, a haunting singularity in the middle of our lives weighing us down with memories.

The bar bowling alley across the street is long gone replaced by more modern buildings city fathers assumed were more respectable. The bungalows in which Garrick lived with Jean for a time we're also gone, replaced by townhouses yet strangely they had kept the magnificent trees.

For a time, I just stood on a small bridge near a narrow river in the pouring rain getting splashed on by speeding traffic as it went by and hit the puddles.

Then slowly --  full of memories -- I made my way back to the park and then to the car and then took the slow drive out to where Bob once lived and then through the tunnel that led to the place where the Red Baron once was and then I drove home.

 I kept thinking of that time capsule in the park and understood that I am also a time capsule that someday someone will open and see all this that once was and is no more.