The Mourning Line

A couple of years ago, while doing my part to help Foley Field get on its feet, I felt the need to be honest, both with my town and with myself: that after residing in Bloomfield for 16-odd years, I'd never even heard of the Field or its glorious history until comparatively recently. It can be like that, you know, for so many of us; get up early, work all day, come home to family chat, dinner and sleep. Do it all over again, and again, and again, and before you know it the years have gone by and except for your neighbors or your kids' teachers, you know more about the office water cooler gossip and life on Mars than you do about your own community. That it took a concerted effort to finally become involved in the life of the town I lived in only proves the point.

I'm explaining this because, not only did I know neither hide nor hair of our dear town-neighbor Christine Lembo, I hadn't even heard of the dreadful occurrence on Broughton until a couple of days after it happened. My son and I were sitting at Mario's on Broad Street last Tuesday night when my good friend Officer Mike dropped in to dinner-up before heading out on the late-night cruise. It seems like the most terrible sin, for a face like his, obviously made by God for smiling, to have to tell such a sad, tragic story. A story given even greater depth and breadth over the next day or so as other gentlemen from Bloomfield's Finest described to me the young girl's hallowed relation to the force, and as a good friend working checkout at Shop-Rite described her daughter's devastation at the loss of a good friend and teammate.

But the story, of course, was not over. Six o'clock Thursday evening, I'm driving south on Broad with my younger son beside me, heading for my apartment across from the high school. Saying that I was in a hurry only serves to highlight what a fool I am; no person in a hurry travels on Broad Street that close to dinner time. But even so, the flashing lights and waving policemen told me this was much more than an ordinary back-up.

People talk about Bloomfield a lot; have you noticed? Everyone has something to say about our contentious politics, our failed and flawed strategies, our impoverished retail districts, our north-to-south disconnect, you name it. Blogs and Facebook posts are full of the stuff.

Despite all the back-and-forth verbiage, in over 16 years as a Bloomfield citizen I've seen but a handful of things that TRULY define the town I call home to me: the opening of Little League season at Wright's or Vassar or football season at the new Foley (the rebirth of Foley itself, of course), the magnificent holiday fireworks or the lesser fireworks at our Town Council and Board of Ed meetings, the Saturday morning tourbus tourists in front of Holsten's, and the Saturday night crowd across the street well after dark, as skater kids film each other's tricks on the front steps and railings of Sovereign Bank. The silent messy majesty of the Third River view from the decrepit bridge behind Memorial Park, and a different kind of silent majesty, that of the simple words STAY STRONG painted in dynamic colors under the rail overpass near my home.

And more than any of these, the sight that greeted my eyes last Thursday night told me without question where on the face of the Earth I live, defining its true quality.

As has been well-reported since then, there was a four-hour long procession of mourners in line, snaking an impossible length down Broad Street from the door of O'Boyles Funeral establishment. So many young people among them, some perhaps as dressed up as they'd ever been, and as my son and I proceeded south we saw more and more well-dressed kids walking northward to pay their respects, to join the Mourning Line.

You've seen black-dressed crowds in front of O'Boyles before; just as you know that anything involving either Bloomfield's Finest or Bravest is a sure-fire traffic stopper every time.

I guess it was seeing, as I crawled on by, all of the young faces in the Mourning Line that hit the nail home for me: Oh. They're here for that girl. That dear, special girl whom I never knew, never heard a whit about. But as the slow traffic crawl allowed my fellow homebound drivers and I ample opportunity to look into the faces, see the extraordinary length and depth of the Mourning Line and share in a little bit of their grief and gravity, we became part of that story too.

Sitting and chatting with the owner of the Lunch Box Cafe over an egg sandwich on Saturday morning, I heard the rest of the extraordinary story, feeling that one-of-a-kind tingle at the base of my neck, electrifying the hairs there; the sensation of being present when a legend is born, one that will be told and retold; the slow funeral procession passing in front of the high school on that perfect day, and the silent crowd out front as a thousand-plus students left books, desks and studies to pay their final respects for #3.

This is the truth; I'm glad I wasn't there. It would've been too much for me. Too much... meaning, I guess.

Besides, I had already seen on Thursday night, what was perhaps the most meaningful, most community-defining image of all my years in this town. The Mourning Line for Christine Lembo, an infinite trail of infinite grief stretching, in spirit, from Broad to Bloomfield to Bay to Broughton (with it's sorrowful candlelit shrine) and back again, stretching from the here-and-now until the distant end-zone of memory. Dressed in black and white and black and grey and black and more black and more, one after the other, looking for all the world through squinted eyes like typewritten letters on a page, row upon row. Letters spelling out a message to all the passersby who think for a moment that this town can ever be summed up by only one opinion, one observation, one soundbyte. a message that says We are more than storefronts and cigarettes and rubble and squabbles and test scores and taxes. We are hearts and souls and tears and dreams, and this is all of us, the best of us, the long endless Line of us, dressed in the finest dark clothes we own to show you all how a community stands together and mourns beloved friends taken too soon. Watch and learn; and whatever you're thinking, think again. We are Bloomfield, and we are alive. Stay Strong.

Steve Crooks can be reached at scrooks@felis.com.