The dust flies up like vengeful pollen, enveloping the men as they crash into each other. Clouds of cream-colored soot follow them down toward the goal, one man deftly guiding the dirty white sphere, others blocking his path or trailing, cattle blinded, clinging dust as spectators encourage, denigrate, gesticulate. Poor goalie, diving in futility, sprawled, immersed in dust, coughing it, swallowing, breathing, swimming in it. Again and again he is caught off balance. It is a massacre.
I snap away, surely aware that my pictures will be smudged and unintelligible. But it is what I do, sitting quietly alone in the splotchy grass near the backstop of this all-purpose field in West New York the day before Memorial Day. I am killing time. The county, while not empty, is less active. Driving around, I see little league games, picnics at Braddock Park, pick up soccer matches, the ever-present Sunday Hispanic league baseball activity, interaction, verbal connections, playful sparing. I see community.
Several days ago, a man on my postal route blew his brains out. He was 85, had cancer for eight months, and, according to the news story, had taken his wife hostage for two hours because she’d prevented him from overdosing his medication. I can remember the searing pain my father experienced as bone cancer left him in agony and my brother tried frantically to find a drugstore open late to fill the morphine cocktail prescription his doctor had written. My father didn’t want to die, but the mixture of agony and bafflement on his face told me he didn’t want to live like this either.
So I had an idea what that man was thinking as he held the gun to his wife less than two hours after I’d deposited his mail up his driveway on their sanctuary-quiet street. Eventually she escaped, this elderly woman, got to a neighbor waiting in her car to go on some errand. Within minutes, police arrived, surrounded the house, shooed curious on-lookers back inside, and then heard one, then a second shot. They found him sprawled in a doorway.
Over 20 years of delivering his mail, not one conversation. Unfailingly polite, he’d met me at the bottom of the driveway, taken his letters, nodded and walked up to his garage, immaculate inside. In the news report, neighbors mentioned they noticed his wife did the driving in recent months while he just sat in a folding chair in front of their little garden and watched her work the flowers.
I discovered he was a restaurateur whose establishment burnt down, driving him into unwelcome retirement. He also lost a son somewhere along the way and that, too, devastated him. I had no other clue as to what this man’s life was about. The next day I saw his wife in the driveway, facing away from me, talking to a young man who seemed to be pointing out features on the car she owned.
She said, "I never knew that."
Her voice was steady, her posture erect. I quickly shoved the mail into the box and scurried to the sidewalk, feeling awkward. One letter advertised a cruise.
No one else was outside. Soon the young man would leave and she’d be alone, alone in a house she’d shared with one man over 40 years. I looked up and down the block. Stillness. Not even a breeze or a dog barking. I felt suffocated by invisible dust. People saw him every day but not really. Not really.
This area needs a loud stream of cursing, I thought; Spanish, English, a burst of laughter, a howl of indignation at the absurdity of such silence. This dust of indifference has swallowed even his ghost. – Joe Del Priore (The author is a frequent contributor to the Current. He can be reached at current@hudsonreporter.com)