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It’s that time of year when the holidays are encroaching, I mean approaching,
and I oughta write something about them. This year will be a little special
for me. You see, there’s one holiday I’ve always missed out on, relatively
at least. That’s my own birthday. It comes between Thanksgiving and Ch
ristmas and it’s always been overshadowed by them. It hasn’t gotten the
recognition it deserved, or so I’ve always felt. Kinda been skimmed over, if you know
what I mean. “Oh, it’s your birthday? I’m afraid I’ve completely forgotten,
what with the Christmas shopping and all. How old did you say you were? You
don’t say! Well, congratulations, I guess. I’m afraid I don’t have a
present for you, but I’ll get you something nice for Christmas. No more
handkerchiefs? I thought you liked them”.
You see how it is. I don’t get no respect. This year will be different
though. I’m reaching a milestone, so it seems, and I’m going to be honored by
the family. I will be rolling in handkerchiefs. It’s a long road that has no
turning and my hour has come round at last. I know in the interest of full
disclosure I should reveal just what hour it is, but invoking my right to
privacy, I’m not going to. I’m also going to stop citing a law for everything I do
with my life. It’s a bad habit acquired from too much Court TV, Unsolved
Mysteries, Law and Order, and the like. A pox on them.
When I was growing up, children’s birthdays were celebrated, but not adults.
Uncle Don on the radio would congratulate the lucky kiddies and tell them if
they looked under the living room couch they might find something nice that
Mommy and Daddy got them for their birthday. Parents’ birthdays went by with
no notice taken, not in my house anyway. It was only when my mother was
approaching 80 that she decided that was enough of a milestone to be mentioned. We
all acted surprised -- heck, some of us were surprised -- and we
organized a party in a restaurant. Did we start something, I wonder? An overseas
aunt of mine has just had a 90th birthday party for herself and I don’t remember
any such thing happening before. The idea could have come from the pictures
we sent. Ripples spread out, you know.
Outside of the birthday discrimination people like me endured, holidays were
generally celebrated in a completely normal way. There was turkey for
Thanksgiving and Christmas too. My parents were immigrants and Thanksgiving was new
to them, but I once heard my mother explaining that when the children started
school and found the other kids celebrating it, she knew it was time for her
to start too. So it was observed to the full, with all the trimmings. Even
the weather cooperated. It was generally overcast and depressing enough to
drive you back into the house for a little more turkey. When TV came along, the
Lions and the Packers entertained us in the morning with some football on ice.
Christmas was Christmas. As a cop you approached it from a different
direction each year. The best year was the one where you had the day off. You did
normal things, like joining the kids in their dawn raid on the presents, maybe
going back for a nap afterwards, going to church, eating too much, sleeping it
off in an armchair, everything else that real people did.
Those were the good Christmases. Next to them, I would say, were the
late-tour Christmases, where you got home at 9:00 AM or so, and joined the family and
maybe previewed the dinner a little bit, before stealing a couple of hours of
sleep which would get you through the rest of the evening. If you weren’t
due in again at midnight, it was almost as good as a day off.
A day tour on Christmas was a total wipeout of course, because you were cut
off from all the normal observances. You could watch other people moving about
dressed in their best for the holiday, going to church, greeting their
friends, getting into cars carrying presents for their families, but you weren’t
part of it. If you felt shut out from the life around you and wondered why you
ever took such a job, stationed far from home among strangers who were having a
good time for themselves, that was just normal self-pity and could be cured
by a good cry, although I don’t know of any cop who ever actually went that far
in his sorrow.
I always considered evening duty, that is, 4:00 PM to midnight, to be the
most depressing way to spend Christmas or any other holiday. At three o’clock
in the afternoon, just as dessert was being served at the family dinner table,
you had to get up from it, put on your overcoat, and leave. Most likely it
was one of those ugly winter days that strain the nerves, and probably the place
to which you were heading was not the kind of neighborhood that would do
anything to relieve them. It was the perfect way to spoil a holiday.
Not every winter day is dismal, though, and Christmas Day of 1954 stands out
in my mind as an example. It was bright, sunny and warm, reflecting my mood
as I drove to work in Harlem at three o’clock in the afternoon. I was a
bachelor in those days, meaning that getting up from dinner didn’t bother me like it
would a married man. I actually felt pretty good about things, just from the
relief of being discharged from the Army in June and getting back on the city
payroll as soon as I could after that. Now for the first time I owned a car
and had a license to drive it and it was taking me to work on a beautiful day.
Things were looking up.
Or so I thought. I found myself stalled in traffic on the Macombs Dam
Bridge, crossing the Harlem River between the Yankee Stadium area in the Bronx and
155th Street in Harlem. Traffic was heavy, so when I saw that the car in from
of me apparently couldn’t move, I couldn’t get into another lane to keep
moving. I saw no solution except to push the stalled car up to the bridge exit
where I could turn off and maybe they would have started with the push.
I signaled the occupants about my intentions and planted my front bumper
against their rear. They poured out of the car and started screaming at me. There
were three of them, black males, all drunk and looking for trouble. I
scrambled out from behind the steering wheel, not wanting to be trapped in the car,
and confronted them as they approached. I got out my Smith and Wesson .38 and
got ready to shoot before they got any closer. I couldn’t take note of
anything but their movements, but I did sense the consternation of the packed
motorists who were trying to get past this trouble spot as fast as God would let
them. If I had had to fire the gun, there was every chance a shot or two could
go wild and hit a driver on the opposite side of the road.
Myself and the three musketeers stayed put for a few minutes while they took
in the gun and considered their chances. They didn’t like them, so they got
back in the car, which started right up and was off the bridge before I could
get into mine. I wasn’t going to chase them anyway because they went west and
I had to go south to get to work. When I got there I didn’t even mention the
encounter to anyone. If I’d been late, I’d have had to use it as an
explanation, but I was on time, so no one cared. I rarely think of it any more, but
when I do it’s usually in response to something like an ad for A Charley Brown
Christmas or The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t or some such title. I then
think of the title I’ve given my experience: The Christmas I Almost Got Thrown
off a Bridge.
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