gaslight

the sky is getting darker earlier. i leave work in 3:30's miserable grayness and come up out of the ground to the last few minutes of wild color in the sky. guthrie and i walk now in twilight and the real dark of night, even though our walks tend to be at the same time as always, around 4:30. the air is getting colder but not yet cold enough for all the knitted wool nonsense i drape around myself. the current promise is for nights that will fall below freezing but it is december and i have not yet been impressed.

i bundle guthrie up in a sweater on these nightdark walks. it is one i knit and it is stripey and the stripes roll back and forth with the movement of his small legs. he is a crazy caterpillar. he stalks on with his newspaper as always, uninterested in the world except that magical spot always three feet in front of him where his wild eyes focus. but the night world is new and i cannot stop my own eyes from sprawling out all over everything. it is not, of course, the real night world- lights out and streets empty. it is that other night world, dark, but full of people hurrying home in the new cold from work, waiting for buses with phones pressed to ears, coming up from tunnels, surprised at the nightness of an hour that was afternoonish in recent memory.

and in my neighborhood there are lights on in windows and curtains are pulled open so it feels like being in a movie where everything is perfect and people open the door with mugs of hot chocolate in their hands. the unimaginable warmth of the lights inside the rooms, the richness of the paint on the walls and the art hung in front of them is steady, constant, all the time.

but it is not the deep prettiness of the buildings and the things inside them that draws my eye most. it is the gaslight. i am pretty sure when these places were built, all was gaslight. the streetlights, porchlights, lights in the house. a whole world flickering after dark. and although the lamps in the front yards of most buildings still sit right where they were put back when this country was still split in two, most of them have little light bulbs perched inside the glass, steady, bright, safe. once in a while one will have an almost blue fluorescence, that glowing white of a gas mantle. these are the tiny burning nets your parents wouldn't let you touch in those old coleman lanterns, burning more slowly and brightly than is reasonable. but on every street here and there are the first old lights, metal spigot at the bottom whispering out propane or butane or whatever gas it is. and there on top of that spigot is fire the color of candleflame, flickering the way real light does, breathing. when you're very lucky you turn down a block and ten or fifteen flames giggle away in their glass homes, shedding less light than the bulb or the mantle, but more lively light. and you can try all you want to tell yourself where you are- new york city and when you are- 2009, almost 10. and you can look at all the folks around you with cellphones and i-things and those horrible stupid scooters darting in and out of cars but your brain is flickering with the gaslight and you can hear the horses stomping on cobblestones as men in top hats and ladies in bonnets brush past you on their way home.