A sliver of hope amid darkening grey days

No three wise men, just three tall running men on the road, seeming all the taller because they are not bulked up in Winnipeg winterwear.

They show a distinct absence of frankincense and myrrh, instead bearing gifts of a bounty of sweat-wicking miracle fabrics and expensive sneakers. They run with the loose, limber-legged strides of bodies that know exactly what’s required of them, a pack in motion.

They don’t need to speak, and their feet share a cadence, while across the road, bundled, I shuffle slow and look for the amber-orange top-lights of the D28 bus, top-lights that, if I see them, mean the bus will pass before I get to my stop.

For nine cold, dark blocks, I see only four people — those runners, and the dog walker whose two charges include a big dog with only three legs, missing one in the front. The sidewalks are icy, the streets, more so, and the most regular colour is the tone cast by the streetlights, raising a grey-blue from whatever they touch. Christmas lights on many houses try hard, but the weight of the grey overwhelms their sparkle. And mine.

The bus takes me, and drops me again, further away from work than it used to.

It is the time of the year when the pigeons die regularly in the lonely cold under the McPhillips railway bridge, single wings stretched out on the snow next to them like cosplaying fallen soldiers. Abandoned road barricades gather drifts. Orange plastic pylons seem like permanent fixtures marking the site of unfinished roadway homework.

The slush is now grey refrozen boot-prints, nobbled peaks and valleys that make walking awkward, all dressed with fine new snow. The curbside puddles are drained now, splashed by wide bus tires across the snowy front yards in a kind of rounded dirty cobble.

Litter still peeks up frequently through the snow, though things as small as cigarette butts and expired bus transfers are paved over. Fugitive plastic bags travel regularly on the wind, corners barely touching the ice-capped snow.

The cleaner slate of the fresher snow has told me what I always suspected: that almost no one walks the cold-winter-morning sidewalks of McPhillips. I am following in the footsteps of the only other walker on my side of the street, and I am unreasonably afraid that I might be the faster walker, the longer stride, and I might come up upon him as he breaks trail.

It seems like a bad idea.

The burnt vacant buildings on my regular route have increased by one since Monday last; the count has risen to seven, with three now torn down. Cars run red lights regularly: rushing cars pass illegally in the bus lane.

Wednesdays and Thursdays, I count the brown-and-yellow garbage trucks that pass by; I never include the green ones or white ones in my totals. I have granted myself permission to count them both ways, both coming and going, morning and evening, so I never fall below eight, even though my methods may mean counting some of them twice on the same day. (My walk, my rules.) Thursday is always a higher total, unless I’ve missed the early bus.

There’s a slight guy leaning against a building at the corner of McPhillips and Manitoba. You do the 360 sweep when you see someone standing still that early on a dark morning, just to make sure you’re at least aware of all the variables.

He’s wearing a high-viz lime-green jacket and heavy black insulated pants with reflective stripes at the ankles. His knapsack is slouched on the concrete steps of the corner storefront, which is a weed dispensary with every window and door frame blocked with metal roller shutters, pulled down tight and locked.

We look at each other the way you look at each other in the night: out of the edges of our eyes, looking without obviously looking, faces turned down as if intent on the design and progress of our own feet, yet still collecting information. His face looks tired, and threads of wrinkles run away towards his ears and down into the flesh of his neck. He is worn.

He is smoking a thin, bright-tipped breakfast cigarette, and the south wind carries the familiar smell of it north with me for more strides than I would have expected.

He may have nodded — I may have nodded back.

Both of us making the most infinitesimal of nods, the kind that tuck immediate deniability tightly in with everything else.

It is the darkest of the dark days now, and that dark drags everything down with it. Drags me down with it. Dark when I go to work, dark when I get home.

It all weighs.

Then, almost to work, I see it.

The sideways orange hook of the fingernail moon. Through the trees, first, and then, eventually, alone on the horizon, the sky already brightening enough to hide the stars and leave that simple, fine curve alone in the firmament.

A little orange dipper of a moon that hangs up there a little bit like hope.

We get to have that, you know.

Hope. Foolish? Maybe. Sometimes, misplaced.

I am reminded, fleetingly and disconnectedly and staggering towards the holiday season, of my rental-car GPS calculating a new plan after I’d turned the wrong way.

Of, years ago, Esmeralda, my mother-in-law’s GPS, making the same recommendation as it weighed all the possibilities.

“Recalculating, recalculating…”

Yes.

Yes, please.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor of the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@ freepress.mb.ca