Sunny's Winter Solstice

Her warm, messy house with too many animals, and smelling of stout on the darkest night of the year. A brief, and holy interlude with the family. Ours. But first, the sister that gets under my skin, the only shorty I’ll allow in my life, is here, showing me her melting snowman cookies and letting her spotty blond dachshund sit behind me, chewing out the heart from a stinky wet fox, killin’ it, as she says. He grabs bits of my hair in his mouth every tenth chew or two. Hurricane tape still on the small windows in her kitchen, various disheveled greens growing sideways on the shelf near to it, always thinking ahead to next year’s garden. But where? All she wants is a farm and not to see people for the wintry five months of the year. She ended up with a southern hick, just like she used to be. One who wears bow ties and writes mild, cold poetry. And takes pictures of nuns when he bikes over the bridge. Two mugs full up of Russian tea – his family’s recipe. They ain’t Russian, though. Pineapple juice, orange juice, tea and Irish whiskey. It may be the ultimate food. Herbals, fruits and citrus, and the clincher. The necessary elixir heated up like a mother’s kiss. They creep inside us and cause a mild raucous disguised by a quiet tipsy sort of feeling. Photos of her Da, who named her after him, Alton, or Al to Allison. I never could quite make out his trajectory – born in Derry, came to Louisiana, and the melding of the drinking problem and the anger, along with her undying love for him, and that photo of him shaving, her by his side. The fact that he moved them to Derry during the Bobby Sands hunger strike – she lived in Northern Ireland for almost a year. I can’t again fathom her prim and tiny mother, a southern, Jesus fearing woman who had a big book of etiquette she pulled out for every occasion, living in any state of Ireland during the troubles. Somehow, he moved them to Central and South America every summer for a good spell as he worked for the sugar factory. No wonder, when she took me out of my mourning and we moved to Red Hook back when, she took all those photographs of the old sugar refinery. It was gone soon after, but it is true on both our accounts that this mad, crooked and secret backwater in all its old, industrial and minute details, would have made both our fathers smile. Mine missed it by just a hair. Just like when Robinson said, a weeks after he had accompanied me to my father’s passing, “I just missed him by That much”.

The night was warm, and we walked down the main street, incomplete colourful lights strung low across the way, and checked in on the infamous light display of the crazy landlord lady across the street. It was a cornucopia of mismatched icons – snowmen, who, plump beneath the night sky, would turn into hungover drunkards by morning light, their bounding stomachs half deflated and they folding in on themselves, close to hitting the earth of flickering lights, wondering how the night kept getting the better of them. Alongside them, and the snowmen, was a complete and munchkin sized nativity scene, complete with the blessed plastic Virgin, the animals, even a full bale’s worth of hay spread out like the makings of a good wildfire. Apparently, right in the center, where the tiny Jesus lays still under streetlights and blinking coloured lights, just about every night in December finds a different street cat moving solidly into place, sitting with paws tucked under and full and still, right in front of the baby Jesus. Red Hook’s notorious feral cat community was a city unto its own. They ate, defecated, and lived alongside us; occasionally we’d bring one indoors, as I did, but they often stared down to those streets and gawked at birds, missing the old game, reformed gamblers or ex cons – the thrill of it all being reduced to windowsills and ends of the bed. It used to be packs of feral dogs, but that was before my time and they sorted that out somehow. Still happens in places like Bucharest, I hear. So then, in the crèche, cradled by the three wise men and the singing snowmen, a strong, tiger print cat with glowing green laser eyes sits like a Savior; the Christ child riding on the back of Bastet, intermingling along the avenue. The walk on the cobbled back street, the lit up row of houses on Coffey, known in drinking circles as the Red Hook Heights – the boom of the fog horns greeted us, along with the increasing smell of herbed fish being fried. A group of kids stood on the corner, making us glad we’d missed the first hour when the families feed at the trough and then back away slowly and take to the surrounding corners and streets. As we approached, the three boys were snapping their fingers and grooving like an old R&B band, one of them in a skeleton costume from the neck down – free as they wanted to be – looking us in the eyes and singing smooth, suggestive lyrics turning dirtier with each line. Allison, still a proper southern girl at heart, put her hand over her mouth and couldn’t stop laughing at them, telling them that they were too young to sing that song! As we walked off, we asked them how old they were, and they said 11. Quick and aggressive, a group of smaller girls nearby, also in a semi circle, yelled to us that the boys were 14! (voices screeching in full blooming). Either way, it was a good start.

Inside, it was Sunny’s as usual; more crowded with a combination of stranger’s faces sitting at tables near the front, and faces behind the bar we knew too well. St. Francis was there, lithe and at work, and Pish, the ruffian barman who moved to Ireland with his red headed spitfire wife, who still wore the same combat boots I wore when I lived there, only to move back to Red Hook, and we were all there still, awaiting them. The thin and the burly, the long beard and the short stubble, perfectly managing each other’s spaces. The best tended bar in the world, I was sure of it. The middle of the bar, where the nooks and crannies begin, the doorway with no glass in its pane leading out to a tiny closet size room with no ceiling, where Sunny, the now aging proprietor, and I, and Wallace once talked about Beckett and Yeats. He didn’t come downstairs much these days…he was getting older, and took care of his very elderly mom who lived there with he and his wife, thirty years his junior and the warmest Missus of the bar you’d ever meet, and their little girl. Sunny was 70 something and had a little girl. The wife (her name was possibly Norwegian or Dutch) sang with the bluegrass band every night. Crammed into the place, you had to watch for the slide guitar, or fiddle or upright bass as you made a trajectory from the bar to the bathroom or out. She sang like a smudged up angel, and there was nothing of the modern world in that place, other than them and our voices. And the ice clinking. Nothing. Opposite to the outside smoking poet's space with no ceiling, was the open window, with no glass, showing us the proper outside space, where the larger, more centered group of smokers and the like could convene, and look in on us. Just underneath said reachable through-to window, on the inside, was the fish spread. Trays and trays of bountiful whitefish, fried up in beer batter (of course), and deep fishy fries, thick and cuddly. Across the walkway, a smaller, satellite bar which I think has never been used for anything except piling the food onto, when it’s there. More food: all homemade by one of the group of characters who ran and ghost owned this place – a sweet, skinny older woman with Mexican braids and a smile so wide. She and others had made salad, pies, macaroons, cakes…..we all can contribute, because this party is word of mouth only, and it gets out. Just on the verge of being too crowded, but everyone minding each other’s perimeters well. Now come the familiar faces, interwoven into the crowds and gatherings…..one moves here and there, and finds old friends, eccentric acquaintances, pregnant women, semi strangers, glances you see on the bus every morning, and more. It’s not a long night. Somehow my experiences of Sunny’s are either end of the night, too drunk to keep going, and a nightcap or final beer, or a simple, easygoing evening. This was the latter. The darkest night being black as it was beckoned as much as home did. We left, with a Red Hooker from New Zealand who had a gaggle of interesting and voracious children. Allison was drunk enough from Russian teas and beers to yell at him “come on, you Kiwi!” She asked him didn’t he know that everyone called him that? Truthfully, it was just her; her notions about many things got lost in the scramble after a motorcycle accident she had in New Orleans years and years ago. She actually forgot how to speak French properly and forgot how to play the fiddle. That portion of her brain just went to sleep, or took to the road.

The Kiwi laughed, as we felt something nearing a summer wind hit us from at least three different angles the moment we stepped outside. Warmer to warm, in December on the longest night of the year. A different group of old men with mad moustaches and kids that didn’t belong to them were straggling their wares just outside – in and around the old green pickup truck from the 30’s that Sunny had bequeathed to Francis a few years back. Smoking, circling, the wind beating beachy mist on their faces and ours. We picked up the pace, as we felt thick, huge droplets of rain starting, just out of nowhere. We knew what that meant; it was about to hit us from the water, a mere twenty feet away. We always stepped lively into a storm, smacking us on the ass like a horny chorus girl's after a night’s maneuvering. Round the corner, and the Kiwi had disappeared for a moment, to try and light a cigarette. No good. She yelled back to him, and he caught up and the rains came. Though the wind was blowing so wicked and whimsically that it didn’t feel all that bad. But, when you looked at the rain falling underneath the street lights, it was a good pourfull. Allison threw in for her last quirky, one in a million fact of the day: “If the sky lights up bright green, we’re fucked. Means a tornado is about to hit in just a few seconds”. No bearing on this storm, but the girl knew her weather, I’ll give her that. We parted at the main street, made promises for pre-Christmas cocktails and I skipped down my long, long street in wet night- quiet, and whistling with the storm and before I knew it, home and warm in bed, the rain beating yellow in a star formation on the outside of all of the windows. Thinking back to the night, to Sunny’s, and thinking about how I hoped more than anything that the place would be preserved and not fall into the changes of this modern thoroughfare we call a home, I loved them. All of the faces, all of the conversations and interactions; the slinging of words, memories and drinks. The way the wood frame house, dusty Christmas lights and secret rooms in the bar and in us all came together, again and again. Real love in the moment, and I wished it would never change. The rain continued, and my eyes tired and closed down slowly. Even the street cats were hidden away. Bet the billowing Santa Claus holiday drunkards bared themselves to the airs and to our superstitious ground, bent over until the morning, the Nativity scene fucked again by the first Winter’s light.

M. Lucia