What do you need 50,000 lights for anyway?
Recently, I sat next to a woman from Grand Rapids on a flight from there to New York. She was planning to attend a convention in Midtown for a few days and mentioned that her children were very specific in their request that she visit Rockefeller Center to see the Today show and the famous Christmas tree. This request makes perfect sense to those who understand — as I do — that the children of West Michigan have a view of New York which is curated entirely by the National Broadcasting Company and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree might as well be Christmas itself.
It was in this spirit that I ventured to 49th Street and Fifth Avenue on Thursday to work in a shared office near the great tree. I was running late on my way in, but I caught a glimpse of it with its 50,000 lights, security perimeter, and growing swarms of early-rising tourists.
When I emerged from the office eight hours later into the throngs of Midtown, more New Yorkers had tested positive for COVID than on any day since the pandemic began. The news had spooked me, but the multitude of shoppers and sightseers seemed unperturbed as I scuttled past the tree and into the GE Building to get on the train away from the crowds.
Eight floors directly upstairs and less than 48 hours later, Saturday Night Live would send home the cast and air what the Atlantic called “one of its strangest and bleakest episodes" owing to an outbreak. One block uptown, the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall was three hours away from beginning what would become — with more outbreaks — its final performance of the year. By the next morning, the lines at COVID testing sites — the most concrete indication of the zeitgeist, if not of actual public health numbers — were markedly longer than usual across town.
My previous plan was to sit down on Sunday after a raucous Christmas party in my apartment on Saturday night and write a year-end version of the Newsletter to make up for last year’s rather grim one (written less than two weeks before my own positive COVID test), which concluded:
“May we all have the good fortune to go about life without thinking of HVAC systems or ICU capacities and the good sense to make real changes with the difficult lessons we have learned this year.”
I am writing with a HEPA filter running under my desk. The windows are cracked and the sound of sirens running to Metropolitan Hospital floats up from 96th Street occasionally (though, mercifully, there does not seem to have been an increase in their numbers). I did not, for the record, learn my lesson about not putting off a haircut in the face of a coming virus.
Even if this is, as the Mayor suggests, a “fast and temporary phenomenon” (which I choose to believe), the trajectory of 2021 did not seem to be headed here. We started in a dark pit. Around the time of the attempted coup in Washington, I came down with what I understood only as a head cold before my taste and smell simply shut off one evening. There was nowhere to go but up, and up is where things went.
If the lasting image of January will remain watching an insurrection with a respiratory disease, my enduring memory of March will be the day that I got a vaccine appointment. Overcome with joy, I shouted out loud in my car as the Detroit skyline revealed itself over the Rouge River Bridge on I-75. “We’re free! We’re free! It’s finally over! I get to live again!”
In April, it was Easter morning when the side effects of my second dose faded away. For dinner that evening, I ate with my grandparents for the first time in a year.
I moved to New York in May, driving a U-Haul through across the George Washington Bridge as I listened to a public radio pledge drive.
A month to the day after my move, I listened to the Mayor declare in Central Park that “New York is back!” as Wynton Marsalis started in on Rhapsody in Blue. New York, it seemed for many months, was back indeed.
There were roller coaster rides and concerts and visitors. Vaccine requirements meant indoor dining, movies, and museums — a safer return to nearly normal life than anywhere in the country. I returned to Michigan a half dozen times for friendly visits and to swim in unsalted water.
Even in a non-pandemic year, it would be hard to point to a time when I have seen more people, heard more live music, ridden more trains, read more books, or had as much fun doing it than in 2021.
The fragility of the whole thing is only a bonus. At concerts, there seems to come a moment each time where everything quiets down and one of the performers says, “We are never taking this for granted again, huh?” And everyone in the room agrees, and their enjoyment is only heightened for having made a little calculation that, on the off chance that they spend ten days isolated in their home, a few hours of live jazz will have been well worth the trouble.
It felt the same way when the whole family was reunited in one room at Thanksgiving: a pleasure which was easily worth the risk and whatever the price of the new HEPA filter was — especially when we awoke the next morning to the news of the new variant 8,000 miles away.
Last Friday, I canceled my Christmas party and, looking to stave off the sense of gloom that follows such a task, set out to buy a Christmas tree for the apartment. Trees are sold on the sidewalk in New York. I found mine six blocks from home. The tree was “cheaper because it is so bare” and cost what it costs to feed myself for two days.
My tree is three feet tall and is decorated with one string of multi-color bulbs. (The lights were on sale at Wankel’s Hardware on Third Avenue, where the window display is unchanged from the usual selection of oscillating fans and dehumidifiers in spite of the holidays.) A tiny model subway — sent by a friend from Michigan — runs around the base.
Five floors down, the line for COVID testing is growing at the end of the block. A few hundred miles south of here, Congress is fighting bitterly. The price of candied peanuts at the Nuts4Nuts stand outside of that subway has increased from $1 to $1.50.
In here, though, is this one small tree. It is not broadcast regularly on television or visited by masses of sightseers. The room smells piney. The radio is on. The windows are fogged up with the humidity from a big takeout dinner. The lights have a sort of warm holiday glow. This is not the spectacular conclusion to the year for which we seemed destined. It is the kind of thing that snaps you back to reality, but the reality remains that we are very lucky indeed.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“The Invasion from Outer Space” by Steven Millhauser in the New Yorker.
“And so, when it finally happened, because it was bound to happen, we all knew it was only a matter of time, we felt, in the midst of our curiosity and terror, a certain calm, the calm of familiarity, we knew what was expected of us, at such a moment. The story broke a little after ten in the morning. The TV anchors looked exactly the way we knew they’d look, their faces urgent, their hair neat, their shoulders tense, they were filling us with alarm but also assuring us that everything was under control, for they, too, had been prepared for this, in a sense had been waiting for it, already they were looking back at themselves during their great moment.”
“Ten Thousand Years” from 99% Invisible.
If you were hoping for a story about nuclear waste storage to get you in the holiday spirit, you’re in luck. We know that nuclear waste lasts a long, long time. How, then, do you warn people 10,000 years in the future — be they living in an advanced civilization or a stone age — not to touch something? It’s harder than it seems at first. Written signage is tricky, so you have to build “menacing earthworks” or create a priesthood of color-changing “ray cats.” I think the best option is not to make a spectacle of the poison land in the middle of the desert, but nobody is asking me.