September 28, 1998

The office and apartment buildings in the Paulus Hook section of Jersey City are very tall and all white. There must be a dozen such buildings down by the waterfront. They've each got hundreds of tinted glass windows; kind of like a fly's eyeball.

The night I was there, not one citizen was out on the clean streets; not even a leaf tumbled along the white gutters. There was one deli on a corner, but it was closed. Everything was very quiet. The moonlight reflected off of the white buildings and the white gutters and combined with the silence to give the place an unearthly feel. (Much the same feeling I get when I go to Canada.)

The temperature was in the mid-70s according to the yellow numbers on a bank's electronic billboard clock. But it felt a lot colder.

I walked to the end of one of the piers at Paulus Hook and looked out over New Amsterdam. Centuries ago, Henry Hudson's ship, The Half Moon, had dropped anchor just about a mile north from where I was standing.

For a while, I leaned forward against a railing, watching the water of the dark Hudson gently slosh against the wooden pillars supporting the dock. In the middle of the river, going to a fro, were the ferries running on engines too far away to hear. From where I stood, they seemed to be propelled only by the breath of God.

Across the river, Manhattan looked like a big, beautiful ball of white Christmas lights; all tangled in a big mass, then stretched and pinched into sharp angles. From that distance, the City was as quiet as the ferries feeding people into it and delivering people from it.

The silence was unnerving. Everything about the night was quiet and clean. Maybe that's why it seemed like the loneliest place in the world. (Again, I get a similar feeling up in Canada.)

For the first time, I felt overwhelmed by New York. Everyone, everything, and every place that was dear to me were out of reach; I was separated from them by thousands of miles of silent darkness. On that pier at Paulus Hook, I felt completely detached from the entire world.

It was a scary feeling.

"Rubber Duckie, all day long."

"Rubber Duckie, sing my song."

The words came suddenly from nowhere and out of my mouth. I was singing a song I hadn't heard since I was five.

Softly, quietly, I began to weep.

Earlier that day I'd read in the paper that Jeffrey Moss, one of the creators of Sesame Street, had died of colon cancer. In addition to writing "Rubber Duckie," Jeffrey Moss created The Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch. Reading about Mr. Moss' death took me back to a smaller time in my life. Not necessarily simpler, but definitely smaller. My world was confined to a few blocks along Shubrick Road in Monterey, California. Back then the population of my world consisted of the 17 kids in Mrs. Dewitt's kindergarten class; all the faceless, nameless starving kids in Africa and China that my mom often spoke about; and those kids of every color living in some far away iron and concrete city on the TV show, Sesame Street.

While my dad was off at sea, my mom and I would watch Mr. Hooper and Bert and Ernie and The Count and Snuffaluffagus on Sesame Street. Then there were those little film shorts from which I learned how chocolate bars were made and how chicken soup was canned. And finally, there were the kids. All these little white and brown and yellow kids running around what looked to me then like a foreign country. I now realize it was New York City. But I had never been to New York back then, nor had I ever seen a place that seemed to be made of nothing but gray concrete and rusting metal. The images of this natureless city scared me a bit, but the kids were fun to watch and the songs were fun to sing.

Detached, as I was, from the rest of the world on that quiet pier at Paulus Hook in the silent, lonely night, I remembered singing those songs with my mom and it made me miss her. She's in Colorado now. We don't get along all that well. That's mostly my doing. She and my dad never understood me, which is a common problem and not terrible in and of itself. It's not their failure to grasp who I was and who I am that bothered and continues to bother me. It's the fact that they've always judged me and offered me advice on everything--every single fucking thing--as if my opinion doesn't matter. It still makes me mad thinking about it. That's why I live 2000 miles from them. We speak occasionally on the phone and I see them a few days each year, but that's about it. I'm on my own and have been since I left for West Point at age 17.

But thinking about Sesame Street made me miss her. It made me miss my dad and Shubrick Road and Mrs. Dewitt's kindergarten class.

I wept a little harder.

Maybe I came to New York because, subconsciously I was trying to return to Sesame Street. I mean, I grew up watching those kids getting along in that strange city. They all got along all the time. Now that I think about it, that was not always the case Mrs. Dewitt's kindergarten class. (The vague recollection of some long ago Eden sharpened into a more realistic picture the more I reflected upon it.) I was always tense and shy and self-conscious and never very popular. I didn't become popular in life until I developed a sharp tongue and started cutting down--overtly, then more subtly--the tense, shy, self-conscious, and unpopular people.

So maybe Mrs. Dewitt's kindergarten class was not really worth waxing all that nostalgic for. But I was still in a homesick state of mind. As the water sloshed the pier at Paulus Hook, I thought about Andrea and I missed her very much. I've missed her for a very long time. We've been civil lately. More than civil; we've actually been very friendly on the phone. She even has initiated a few conversations lately by actually being the one to pick up the phone and call. We have even been talking about meeting down in D.C. some weekend for lunch. I've secretly been hoping that we'll maybe get back together. I mean, I haven't thought it out, but it would be nice. I did love her. I still do.

But we did fight a lot. (A horn on a ferry blew, and as it broke the silence of the night wide open, so did it change my thoughts about me and Andrea.) What would reviving a romance do? Maybe we'd get back together for a little while in the spirit of regaining the love we shared early on. Maybe we'd get back together for a while to right the horrible emotional wrong of our divorce. (That is not to say that the reasons for our divorce were wrong; I'm just saying that right or wrong, the pain that we both went through was too agonizing and too prolonged. We were friends first and neither of us, deep down, wished the other person ill.) But maybe we'd get back together with the best intentions, just to slide back down into the mire of our own incompatibility. Maybe some people really are better friends than they are partners and no amount of "work" can change that. Maybe forgiveness is more important than restoration.

Perhaps I should be thinking about forgiveness when it comes to my parents, too. They're not going to stop judging me, but maybe I can stop judging them so critically. They're the only parents I've got and when they die I'll miss them. It's as simple as that. Before I know it, my parents are going to look like my grandparents. Then they will die. Then I'll die. We're all going to die and that is that.

For a moment, that thought terrified me. But before I could start down the familiar trail into my valley of despair, something equally familiar came charging up that trail kicking up enough dust to rival a thousand horses.

"Today's show is brought to you by the letters A, N, and Q and by the numbers 7, 15, and 83." I hadn't thought about that in years; probably not since Mrs. Dewitt's kindergarten class. I laughed out loud thinking about that opening line from Sesame Street. I'm laughing out loud now as I write this story.

Man it's weird. Back in kindergarten--all the way through high school--everybody was in the same boat. We knew the same people and we learned the same stuff. Then everything changed. Each of our lives got a texture of it's own. We scored our own touchdowns and ran into our own walls. There's no more Mrs. Dewitt or Mrs. Oglesby or Mrs. Lind or Mr. Koppel doing their best to make sure we all get an equal chance to succeed. We're all on our own now. The hundreds of thousands of Mrs. Dewitt's kindergarten classes have been scattered and dumped all over the country. From Portland, Oregon to Poughkeepsie, New York, all of us kids who grew up chasing our cares away on Sesame Street now chase competing dreams on Wall Street and on Madison Avenue. The same kids who smiled all the time and celebrated sunny days now pass each other with cold stares on their way to work.

It's too bad really. But there's nothing really one can do about it. You can never go home again, so it is said. But I bet a lot of people my age felt sad when they read about the death of Jeffrey Moss. I know nothing about the man; I just know his work, which was kind, light-hearted, and good. It shames me to think how my life and my work has strayed so far off that street called Sesame.

For more than 20 years, I'd lacked a sense of where I was. The maze kept getting more and more complex. But I feel a little taller now and I can see over the cynical and self-hating tangle of hedgerows. And, though I'm still far away, I can see the lights of Sesame Street again.

 

Broadway Jim Jenkins