Christmas Eve in Scranton

 

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

 

SCRANTON – I got to Scranton early on Christmas Eve so I took a walk down to the iron smelting forge, now part of the city’s historic landmarks along with Steam Town rail museum. The city is sharply divided here with poverty so stark it reminds me of Newark, except that a huge portion of the poor people here are white.

Some jackass in a silver station wagon yanked his car in a sharp u-turn as I crossed on street, narrowly missing getting hit by traffic on both sides. This is the nature of Scranton males, a macho stupidity inspired by drugs, alcohol and lack of self worth. While this jerk stood out, nearly all of the men driving here are full of attitude, as if asking anybody to stop them from doing anything they want, brewing for a fight in which they can take out their frustration on someone’s face.

I strolled by a small, 1920s era hotel, one of those strange places that have long vanished from New York and New Jersey in those states’ push to hide its poverty behind redevelopment or drive out poverty by making living there unaffordable.

The hotel had a bar door and then another to the hotel proper, with a sign on the hotel door saying “No guests after 10 p.m.”

I was later advised by my ex-wife that this was a place of ill repute, though I knew that the moment I saw the place and the two men stumbling out of the bar side full of the same attitude the driver of the station wagon had.

Snow clung to the street despite the sunlight and the warmer than normal weather, and the lawn between the forge and the water runway shimmered unmarred by man’s footsteps as if the surface of some unexplored planet. This was a tourist place, and tourists didn’t come here in the winter so I felt as if I was the first man on the moon, strolling down towards the open mouths of this man made stone canyon like a real explorer.

With the end of the decade only days away, such places give me pause, making me reflect on how fast technology is changing – how even in the last ten years things that are still knew to me are becoming extinct such as the music CD and the video tape, and familiar and reliable things such as cassette tapes are already nearly expired. Yet we have these icons of the past and the poverty around them the result of their decline, icons to an industrial past we can no longer reclaim – abandoned as historic while we move on to some other concept for making our living.

I felt colder walking back from the forge to meet with my daughter, as if I was walking through a graveyard and expected – like Scrooge – to find my name engraved on one of the stones, old Victorian era houses decorating Cedar Avenue much in the same way they did in Cape May, only decayed, dilapidated, filled with people who have nothing left in their lives but attitude, and cheap hotels in which they can take comfort. I was almost depressed enough to walk a drink, but knew that feeling the way I was just then, how I am feeling most of the time these days, I would not handle other people’s desperate attitudes well, and that I might just give them what they wanted, but in reverse. Maybe I can’t see myself, and my attitude, or can’t hear in my voice the same tones my elders had when they saw the changes my generation wrought. But it all feels different to me, more savage, as if we are reverting not progressing, losing our humanity as we advance our technology.

As I close in on sixty, I get more and more nervous about dying – since my anger tends to put me at the same risk as my family has for stroke and heart attack. And yet,  my living to 91 like my grandmother did scares me, too, partly because I can’t imagine how much more inhuman the world will be in thirty years if it is already this inhuman now.