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One of the hardest things I've ever had to do in my life, I did last Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. I left home again.
I had been back in Niagara Falls for 30 days. I had not seen everyone I wanted to see and I had only scratched the surface of the things I had hoped to do. After being away for so many years, I was trying to refamiliarize myself with the city, retracing old steps, looking up old friends, reconnecting with family, trying to understand what happened to the city I grew up in and what, if anything, I could do to help put it all back together again.
The most daunting challenge, I found, was trying to convince people that our city could be great again.
I spent hours with people from all over the city, remembering how good things were back in "the good old days." We sat and laughed about the fun we had as kids, running around the tourists, who seemed back then to be swarming all over the place. We remembered the movies and 25-cent popcorn, and we closed our eyes as we conjured up visions of the crowded little shops that lined Falls Street, selling everything "Niagara" from pencils to cotton candy.
Someone recalled the legless gentleman who sold his pencils from his position two feet off the ground. What a nice man, we remembered. He always seemed to have a good thing to say to everyone, never looking for a handout, just a fair price for his pencils and whatever other trinkets he had to offer. We all agreed that he was an inspiration. Mom used to point out that if he could make a living like that, none of us had any excuses for not wanting to work.
Someone else said there was a man who sold hot peanuts from a push cart with a whistle that blew a high-pitched greeting from a block away, with the aroma of roasting peanuts wafting all around him, giving everyone fair warning to dig out a nickel for a hot bag.
I remember helping the manager of the Strand and Cataract movie theaters. As an usher, part of my job on some Wednesday nights was to help put up the giant posters and change the marquee for the new movies starting the next day. I had to help hold the ladder as the poor wobbly manager made his way up to the top rung, while I passed up the letters that spelled out the feature attraction. We actually drew crowds who'd stop and stare as we put the letters in place, slowly spelling out "SINK THE BISMARK" or "SOUTH PACIFIC" or "HARD DAY'S NIGHT."
Sometimes, at the last show, the manager would leave the lobby doors wide open so people could catch a glimpse of the coming attractions. He'd turn up the movie volume, competing with the pulsating beat streaming out of the club across the street, where beautiful, hot Canadians and Americans gyrated to the country soul music created by our local musical geniuses.
The streets were lined with drag-racing hot rods right off the covers of the latest magazines. Falls Street was a natural gawking ground for anyone who wanted to see or be seen, a veritable fashion show of all the latest, funkiest, crazy combinations of cultures from all over the planet. Africans, Indians, Bohemians, cowboys and cowgirls, rednecks, white collars, hookers, musicians, poets, writers, corporate executives, men, women, children, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, atheists and plain old common folks, were all at home on Falls Street.
The old buildings were leaning together in a way that only time knows how to preserve, with layer after layer of paint and concrete and wood and glass, all scratched and worn by the people who leaned on the buildings and on each other for the kind of support a city needs in order to know who it is.
Falls Street gave us identity. It was a place. It was what you did after you saw the falls. Falls Street had character, complete with fistfights, loud partying and echoing laughter. It was a mixture of everything good and bad about the city. It was part of my home and, as hard as I looked, no matter where I searched, I could not find it again.
Instead, I found a collection of vacant oversized grave markers that boldly stand where once, not so very long ago, walking, talking people actually lived.
One of those events you cannot plan on or ever prepare yourself for happened a few days before I was scheduled to leave. My sister Joanne's daughter had to be rushed to the hospital. Davida, my precious little 23-year-old niece, was born with Sickle Cell Anemia.
I know most of us have heard of it but, thankfully, most of us have never had to deal with it. Just like anthrax or a terrorist's bomb, Sickle Cell Anemia can sneak up on its victims and render them absolutely helpless. Periodically, Sickle Cell patients can go for long periods of time with no symptoms at all, but when it hits, it can be a vicious, brutal, painful demon, stabbing its victims repeatedly wherever, whenever it wants, invisibly striking the most vulnerable organs of the human body.
Last week, Sickle Cell Anemia put my niece, Davida, the mother of twin 11-month-old girls, in the Intensive Care Unit at Niagara Falls Memorial Hospital.
Thankfully, the people of Niagara Falls fought to keep this wonderful, hope-filled place alive.
The ICU is staffed with some of the most talented, caring people in the world. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet some of them, including the core of the unit, the RNs. It is people like Amy, Sue, Louise, Lisa, Candy, Josetta and Drs. Khan and Ventresca, who reflect the values of the good people of Niagara Falls. Against the odds, in the worst circumstances life has to offer, in the most difficult times, they come to work to save lives.
As I left the hospital Friday morning on the way to the desolate Buffalo airport, assured by the staff that my niece would be all right, I wiped a tear away before the next elevator rider stepped in.
"This is exactly what Niagara Falls needs," I thought. "Intensive care!"
"I'll be back," Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous line from the "Terminator," roared louder than the jet engines as the plane rotated off the runway taking me back to Florida.