From Reverend Billy
I jaywalked across Brooklyn Avenue, one of the famous Avenues of Death where bicyclists and pedestrians perish, and I was quickly trapped in a flood of metal on a little island halfway across, with a patch of exhausted grass and some trees, three trees, standing there like a family.
I looked at the trees and before I could check my mouth I’d said, “There’s a wind, you feel it? No? Didn’t I see your leaves fluttering? Well, OK, not much.” I don’t believe I expected an answer to my question. They did look like a family waiting to cross, two taller trees (but only maybe ten or twelve feet high) and a smaller teenage tree. They might have been poplars, but I don’t know my trees, although at home I have a “Trees of New York” with full color photos.
The thing is they had a definite mood, the tree family, as they waited. A mood or a kind of angle on our hopeless situation here. There was a distant feeling, maybe it was wind. (Wind can happen anywhere). If they made a beautiful leaves-in-the-wind foresty sound, the cars and trucks and sirens and horns would angrily erase the music. “Can’t hear you!” I laughed with a wide-eyed stare. I couldn’t help it I kept thinking they would start talking to me.
Was there wind? There was the churn of tailpipe smoke whirling around. Yes, well, there might have been card-carrying wind mixed in there but by the time you’re on a traffic island on Death Avenue no gentle breeze, no singing bird, no sunny side of the street can save you. And if I’m standing here imagining a beautiful day, then I’m just a schmuck.
Was there wind? The kind of wind that seems like whisper of thought going by? Here? Between the blurs of cars and e-bikes and giant garbage trucks…. I stood with the family and noticed for the first time that their leaves had a shine to them. A happiness. A batcrazy person might even see a kind of family photo with satisfied faces…. I was fending off a feeling of intimacy. There was no break in the tumult of traffic but maybe I didn’t want one at this point.
I sensed a faint but coherent breeze making its way through the cars, which were grinding to a bitter halt. I looked around for an accident. The cars stopped completely now. The wind was here, suddenly, acting like it never left. I wouldn’t say that the wind was “picking up”. It certainly wasn’t a “gust” – I wouldn’t go that far. But the trees in their noble patience seemed to sense something, a kind of knowledge they shared with some type of air that got here through the alleys and over the roofs through the legs of the water towers.
You know that feeling sometimes, when something happens and you wonder if you will make a mental note to yourself that this was “an experience.” I did that. I told them it was true. I told the family “I will remember this. You want me to get you something?”