I’ve gone to Hackensack twice in the past few weeks, helping a friend out with an errand or two, and I ended up there on Christmas Day, early in the morning, when it was brutally quiet. I had to kill some time so I drove through the small downtown strip, where all the storefronts are full, even if half are tacky clothing stores, and the other sell cellphones. There was an old free-standing Sears building from the 1930s which was pretty amazing. But I wondered, of course, how Hackensack made its living, because surely it could not be just on those stores. Then I made my way down to a park by a river and I took some pictures. I have not yet tired of the muted blues and greys of a winter sky.

Later I made my way to a diner where all of the waitresses were having their own running monologues, and occasionally I stepped in the middle of them. In the basement bathroom, a short, miserable, blond waitress furiously tucked her shirt into her pants and then adjusted her apron, all the while muttering, “Not good, not good,” over and over again. She looked like girls I went to high school with who smoked cigarettes behind the McDonald’s, which seemed impossible because, of course, it’s more than twenty years since I’ve been in high school. But she had that same lean, raw look to her. Maybe it was the fact that she carried her problems with her wherever she went. Even to work. Especially to work.

Upstairs the slender, feather-haired waitress who served me was more cheerful, perhaps even mildly enamored of me. She told me I ate like a bird because I didn’t finish my nearly perfect breakfast of eggs, bacon, hash browns, and an English muffin. When she brought me my check, she told me she liked my sweater, and, without me saying a word in response, she reached out and stroked my arm and said, “It’s as soft as I thought it was going to be.” As she cleared my plate, she dropped a fork, and said, “Everyone is dropping silverware today. That’s the THING today.” She looked at me and smiled and still I was silent. “Actually it’s knives. Everyone is dropping knives.”

On my way out the cashier, an aging beauty with deep purplish lipstick, rang me up and said, “I’m so tired.” She handed me my change. “It’s too early to be this tired.”

It wasn’t even 11 AM yet. She was right. It was too early to be that tired.

Later I went to Dumbo for Christmas dinner at the home of Vannesa and Johnny, two of the most gracious people on the planet. They had just gotten a new stove and were showing it off, and it was just beautiful. Their last stove was a ratty little thing, fine for heating up a kettle or maybe making some pasta. But this, this was a stove, a majestic creature, vintage, gorgeous, a thing of substance. “They even have a website for people who own them,” said Vannesa giddily. She made me take a picture of the burner flames, because they looked like flowers.

Then they asked me what I had done all day and I said, “I went to Hackensack,” and they said, “That’s where we bought the stove!”

So now I know how Hackensack makes a living. Diners and cellphones and pretty old stoves big enough to make a beautiful Christmas dinner.

(12/27/10) | 3 Comments »