Nurse the Hate: The Bridge At Christmas

When the large American car lurched from side to side across lanes of the bridge on the Parkway, I will admit I was concerned.  Not as concerned as I should have been as I had a bellyful of port and was safely nestled into the womb of the backseat.  From the back of the sunken leather seats, the various panicking other motorists forced to veer violently out of my Uncle Jack’s car’s wake seemed like something that had little to do with my life.  My father was seated to my right.  It was odd to see him in the back seat of any car, much less as obviously frightened as he appeared to be now.  He stared out the window wide eyed as Jack steered the mighty American Auto Ship on his own course.

We usually went to New York on Christmas to visit my father’s side of the family.  We would go out to eat in Manhattan the night after Christmas as at that point no one with “Miller’ in their last name had any capability in the kitchen.  I might be the only person in my extended family able to cook an appealing meal from scratch to this day.  However, at this point in time, I was as hopeless as the rest of them.  There was a routine.  The family would get all greased up at cocktail hour in Tarrytown.  Jack would pull his enormous car out of the driveway for us to take the trip to The City where we would eat at a landmark New York restaurant.

It is important to note that Jack Ford was a man from a different age.  He was a man from a time when the number of cocktails had no effect on the stance of "readiness to drive".  The man drove there.  The man would drive back.  To suggest he should not drive was an affront to his masculinity.  It was literally impossible to get the keys from him even if you had witnessed him having seven scotches at dinner with a few after dinner belts.  Jack Ford was an older man at this time with compromised vision, especially at night.  Even in perfect conditions I would not describe his reaction time as being akin to a mongoose.  The drive back from dinner was a doomsday scenario.  The only thing to do was settle in to the backseat and hope for the Lord’s grace.

The best part of going to The City with Jack was his encyclopedic knowledge of New York’s history.  He would point out where Mob bosses had been gunned down, Irish immigrants forced to work in slave conditions, and former brothels he had “heard about” with a wink.  Meanwhile my Aunt Rose would be countering with a stream of consciousness monologue that would make Neal Cassidy jealous.  The return trip was a different matter.  That was more of a white knuckle affair for all concerned.

I had an image pop into my mind from that drive of seeing a small apartment window from the bridge.  A small string of yellow lights was intertwined with a strand of garland.  They had set it to light up in a “two quick blinks, pause, three quick blinks and a long flash” pattern.  It was humble but joyful.  It made me wonder what the lives were like of the people that lived there behind that little window.  Then my Uncle Jack’s car lurched to the left and it was gone.