Sunlight falls across the white page, the floor, the picture of Buddha carved from stone on a mountainside in Borobudur, Indonesia; fills the whole room with light and even a little warmth on this end-of-winter morning in Allston, Massachusetts. The pigeons sit, as usual, on the ledge of the red brick firehouse across the way. Through the window I can see a blue-uniformed fireman sweeping the floor. Sometimes, late at night, I’ve watched them play cards. Occasionally the bells sound, and their engines fill the streets with frenzy and purpose. Otherwise, they wait, like me and not unlike pigeons, for their chance to be useful to the world.
Solitary, well-wrapped early morning walkers carry the hefty Sunday Boston Globe from the Citgo convenience store back to flats, waking families, coffee cups, and their own window views. I’ve already read the paper. Marshall Dodge — great eastern seaboard, world-travelling storyteller, creator of “Bert and I” stories, inspiration to a whole generation of lovers of legend — died in a car accident at the age of forty-one, poof, out like a candle, and I had a little rush of sadness over tea at the donut shop. And the apocalypse budget for America in 1983 will be $221 billion dollars: good news for General Dynamics, Honeywell, Rockwell; bad news for the poets and old-age pensioners. Empires make the empire poor; the fifth column, the heart, the inner city crumbles first.
The asphalt view that I have, stretching down Commonwealth Avenue to the glass skyline of Boston in one direction and over the bridge to Cambridge in the other direction, is quiet — being Sunday — and not as bleak as the newspaper, nor as dreary as it can be on a gray, rainy morning. In fact, the flood of sunlight, the hint of spring in the windy streets, lifts the spirit from the concrete ennui of the city. A woman in a gray hooded coat, with hands in her pockets, is actually dancing alone at the bus stop a block away. She is turning and twirling with herself, and now with me, and now with you.
Isn’t that a miracle, that we can all dance together through time and space, that even when the bus takes the woman away, she dances still? She dances into eternity. She dances through the nerve endings of the spine. She makes the little Selectomagic typewriter ball dance. She dances with the proofreader. She dances with the art department, doing the deadline polka. She dances through the gears of the printing press. She dances in the back of the Magazine Shippers truck. She dances through all the happy or sad circumstances of our lives.
It is a miracle that we can dance in the face of the holocaust. We can all dance to heaven, where Marshall Dodge will tell us great tales of the mortal realm. We can do the Long Island asphalt boogie, or the Brand New Tennessee Waltz. We can do the Ghost Dance. We can wait like the firemen for our chance to stave off disaster. We can wait like the pigeons for one of God’s creatures to throw away the crust of bread we need. We can wait like the stone Buddha through galaxies of worlds and eons of time for a glimpse of wisdom with which we might observe the eternal mystery of the changing world of things.
And while we are doing all of this — waiting and working — I wonder if we ever can know what good we might do. Maybe the harder we try, the more we upset the balance, and the faster we must scramble to regain it. Maybe dancing alone, in the cold, will do more good than we could ever know.
I saw this piece in New Age (244 Brighton Avenue, Allston, Massachusetts, 02134) and liked it so much I asked Rex Weyler if we could reprint it. He kindly agreed.
— Ed.
