New Year's Eve In Union Square

It had been my own fault entirely. As I chatted with my old friend from Dublin, James Higgins, I realized that the downpour had been threatening all day. It was the year's end and I'd been caught out as I strolled downtown in the drizzle, lost in thought, oblivious of the minatory atmosphere.

I'd been trying to catch a few minutes away from work, and had precious little time for intense reflection, and so I abandoned myself to a few preliminary epistemological themes: How the old rheumy eyes were working that afternoon: late Impressionistic; how the old stoppled ears were picking up sounds: mid-'40s Iron Curtain classical; how the busted old Nixonian schnoz was bearing up under the odoriferous Manhattan assault: the air was raw and seasoned with ozone, steam pipes, orange peels, marinated cardboard, and the liniment of bike messengers venting their passions from the asphalt, tempered with middle notes of leather gloves, and finished with wet scarves and dampening woolen clothes.

As I scraped along 17th Street, I observed the familiar assemblage of figures: the African street vendors selling hats, socks, and handbags; a sad-faced Orthodox Jewish man with his head leaning under a big ebony umbrella; some young people entreating pedestrians to sign petitions to save the environment; a homeless couple and their cat, huddled on a blanket; some purposeful postmodern beauties; some hip white boys in dreadlocks, one older chap "out there," with his 'locks descending to his ankles; some frenetic real estate agents; an Irish doorman; the building man from Malta, hanging out by the freight elevator; some glum Caucasian college students at the counters of Starbucks, staring out the windows; some black kids giggling outside McDonald's; some construction workers and deliverymen from a cheap coffee shop across the way; the outlines of deceased buildings etched on the walls of surviving edifices, and the last few leaves clinging resolutely to the wintry trees.

As I walked, I pondered the day's events and was well inside historic Union Square Park when the sky darkened precipitously. A couple of cops by the newsstand at the Union Square East subway station stared at the heavens. People started running and the torrents began descending.

Only the skateboarders near the barricades around George Washington's equestrian statue seemed unconcerned. Children raced laughing and screaming up the block from Irving Place. Folks outside the shops across the avenue took shelter and waited. And then, as suddenly as it had commenced, the deluge departed.

After the cold drenching rain had quite subsided, a few bedraggled squirrels hopped out along the backs of the long curving line of benches in hope of a handout. The Greenmarket regained its composure. And now and then, a rogue wave of icy water spilled from the awning of a booth with a sudden splash.

The dregs of the downpour trickled across the round metal grids about the base of the trees in the pedestrian paths, the puddles in turn reflecting the unnoticed metallic mirrors.

A gray squirrel, perched high in the branches of a Pin oak, flicked its thick bushy tail, which became a new pennon in the treetops, the thin hairs splayed at the end, part of the outline of bare branches stretching southward across the hiemal sky. Another appeared in my path, indignant for baksheesh of bread.

As I sauntered back, I thought of the latticework, mullions and high windows along 18th Street -- where the wrought-iron balustrades and stairwells of the opulent Siegel-Cooper emporium, which anchors Ladies Mile on the Avenue of the Americas, are displayed for passersby -- merging with the reflections of buildings across the way and forming fantastic shadow structures, a magical assemblage of dream edifices, a futuristic cenacle of impossibly high skyscrapers, aerial shapes, and bridges reminiscent of a Victorian artist's conception of how the utopian metropolis would appear in times to come. They reminded me of long piles of leaves that lay in contrast on the lawns of Battery Park, around the time of the first snowfall, as if the crumbling half-buried ribs of a galleon at low tide.

Then the hibernal sun was out and the sewer caps glistened as if bezants composed of molten platinum, and wreaths of glory appeared as the late afternoon light splashed against the high-rises, painting the water towers, and tingeing the nondescript outbuildings on the rooftops with a transfiguring gleam, for a moment allowing them to shine as brightly as the lambent heaps of windows below, while each new structure became in turn a vexillum of desire, a casement of dreams, a flagship seeking the northwest passage to the equinox.

And then I was back in my office, finishing up my work and racing for the door, where the wicked noise of the rush-hour traffic would "begin and cease and then begin again," crisscrossing the pell-mell headlamps in a recurring frenzy, the blind mouths of the multitude of vehicles sweeping across the noctilucent streets and reflecting against the dim ceiling as if searchlights under the sea.