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A silent night. Then a brief brilliant burst of sound. [1]
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Date: 2023-12-17
When I was young I was a cop. I’m in my very late sixties now.
For most of my time as a cop I worked the midnight shift, with only occasional forays on afternoon or day shifts. I liked the night. As I joked, I could get more done if no one was around.
During the Christmas holiday season the police department I worked for would let cops trade shifts or hours of time with each other. If someone was scheduled to be off on New Year’s Day, but wanted to be off on Christmas Day, they could trade with someone who had the opposite situation and was willing to trade. Vice versa was true, too.
The most popular situation entailed someone who was working the midnight shift on Christmas, eleven at night to seven in the morning. A cop on the afternoon shift, three to eleven, could ask a midnight cop to take the latter half of their afternoon shift, meaning four hours of the shift. The midnight guy would pick up those hours and tack it onto their midnight shift, making their shift run from seven in the evening to seven in the morning.
Because of how our duty days rotated on our department, with six days on duty and two days off, over time you’d work plenty of Christmas Eves and Christmas Days, so there was always a chance for trading. Since I worked the midnight shift for most of my time as a cop, I was a prime target to be asked to do those “pick-up” hours. It was pretty routine for me to do twelve hour Christmas shifts.
I was married then, my wife worked as a nurse and she also worked the midnight shift, and we had no kids, that would come later. So, again, I’d get requests to take those extra hours and I did.
I didn’t mind. I knew that picking up their hours meant they could have the evening of Christmas Eve to celebrate with their family, especially the kids. I was happy to do it. I also didn’t mind because Christmas had lost some luster for me. I had really, really loved it as a kid and during my teen years, even into college. The hub bub, the music, the lights, the anticipation, were all things that buoyed my spirit. Christmas glittered for me.
But things changed. I found myself less and less entranced by it. It just seemed that the spirit had drifted from me and there was nothing specific that set it adrift. At least nothing I could put my finger on.
Some people, it seemed to me, came into the job of being a cop already cynical and jaded, others came into the job looking to become cynical and jaded, like they’d pick up street cred in doing so, others found that time just starts to crust up their feelings and emotions a bit, fight it as they might. More than just a few wanted the gun and badge, power that was granted haphazardly and with disregard.
Most cops I knew that were decent didn’t notice any encroaching crust, so they didn’t even acknowledge it. If they did they’d just say they were managing it, if they said anything at all. Most of the time they didn’t say anything at all. Jobs are like that, a film that builds up over time, until you’re sporting deep, dense cataracts that don’t let you see the dreams you once had.
Often, there comes a point on the midnight shift, if the radio calls and chatter will die down, where time becomes weightless. It’s not one o’clock in the morning, or two o’clock in the morning, or three o’clock in the morning. It’s no o’clock. Time just suspends itself and you’re just floating with it.
For me, at least, during the no o’clock time my mind would drift to thoughts that were not so much deep, although they could be, instead, they were something that curled around in my head like lazy chimney smoke, as if it was trying to climb somewhere up above, reaching for some sort of spot up there. Sometimes it did reach up there. Just as often, in fact, probably more so, it didn’t.
During those Christmas Eve into Christmas Day shifts that I worked I’d feel a soft melancholy ease into me. Believe it or not, I didn’t mind. I actually looked forward to it. It was a melancholy that had a certain bittersweetness to it, like mythical sugar plums had been slid into it, bobbing around in some sort of, well, I don’t know, some sort of something, I guess. I wouldn't say I embraced the feeling, but I did welcome it. Not sure there’s a difference, but it seemed to me there was.
When no o’clock drifted in, and the squad car’s wheels were just mechanically rolling around and around slowly — you weren’t going anywhere special — the melancholy felt comforting. You were alone — they’d never think to schedule two-man cars on a Christmas Eve — and the calls had died down to next to nothing because people were curled in their beds or quietly moving gifts into place under the tree in their homes.
There were a couple of calls I hated, especially during that Christmas shift. The worst were family domestic calls involving children, most commonly heard over the radio as, “Six-L-Eleven, you have a domestic with children at . . .” For those Christmas calls you’d usually find, far, far too often, that it was the husband coming home drunk, having decided to go out with his buddies to have a beer before heading home for the special evening. A beer would become beers. And coming home for the night would be like a visit from hell. It certainly wasn’t anyone’s idea of a gift.
I didn’t like domestics-with-children calls at anytime of the year. It was the kids that made those calls so gut tightening. The screaming, yelling, wild gestures, threatening physical motions, if not actual violence, and the general upsetting nature of it all really seemed to fill kids with a fear you could taste. I could never look away. I saw the damage it did.
For whatever reason, through the course of my time as a cop, whatever the time of year, it seemed like I’d get assigned those calls as the lead car far too often. But, even if I was a backup car, I’d still leave those calls doused in the despair of lives gone so wrong. When it happened to me on the Christmas shifts, and it did, it would leave me shaking my head, like I was trying to toss off a head punch. I never got used to them.
You know what I did like? I liked how I’d watch the start of my shift so crammed full of cars and people all moving into their Christmas. As the hours ticked along that traffic and the commotion trickled down until it was nothing. And, if you were lucky it would be snowing, so the streets, homes, stores, factories and warehouses would be making their own snow globe in real space. It was special. It was a sugar plum. It didn’t happen often.
There were, thank goodness, no domestic-with-children calls that Christmas night I’m thinking of, at least none in my area, although I heard a couple of calls dispatched on the radio earlier in the night. None, though, that I’d have to respond to, not as the lead car and not as one of the backup cars. I image that I still pursed my lips and looked slightly away, catching some sort of middle ground in space with a stare, when I heard the dispatch of cars to those calls.
I wasn’t there to see what took place at those calls, though. Feeling it was probably a different story. My body, I imaged, shifted into its usual slight rigidness for its momentary sense of sadness, before I’d look away in my mind’s eye. Knowing me, I’m sure I breathed a, “Sure, why not. It’s Christmas. Can’t have peace on earth, can we. That would just be too kind.” I’d just drive on.
Eventually, the traffic of people and cars melted away that night and I could start my tour of melancholy in peace. My Christmas comfort, as it were. It was a nice cold Christmas, but not bitterly so, just acceptably cold with dry streets and the evergreen of Christmas trees in people’s homes. There was no wind, so the cold didn’t snap at your face.
If they were nice to me they’d leave the living room drapes or blinds open so I could see the trees. If they were really nice they would leave the trees lit. No harm to my melancholy with that sugar plum. It was a clear night. No clouds. I remember that. I liked it. Pulled my car over and got out at one point, then looked up at the few stars that could peek through earth’s own light smog.
Drifting down streets, both major and side, I pointed the car to no particular place, but I definitely made sure to drive by something that could fuel the melancholy. There was a very large plot of land, long vacant, that had nurtured some nice size trees. They were wonderful. I knew that commerce would make a march on it some day. Eventually they’d be gone. Green space is often an affront in an urban area, a deadly sin to be cut down at its roots. Business people can be pastoral like that.
Since it was winter the branches were bare, although there was some sort of fir tree in the middle of them and I liked the green, plus that plot of land wasn’t strewn with junk, so it was a nice little vista. Drove by that a few times during the night. There was another spot even bigger, but I won’t say anything about that. Funny the secrets we keep and the ones that we will tell. The car and I were drifting this way and that way. It was silent, still and with little of life’s motions. A silent night.
Police radio transmissions are usually colorless in their tone. Flat voices saying things with little trajectory beyond what needs to be said and is then said. Sure, sometimes those voices go fast and meaningful. Major calls might hear the dispatchers add just a teeny, tiny bit of push to them, as if to say, “Hey, listen to this.” If it’s the squad cars you can hear the cops clip some urgency and heightened modulation to their voices. “I’m in pursuit of . . . ” “Change my traffic stop to a code one, gimme some backup.” “Out of my car and on foot, the suspect is . . .” But, for the most part, the tone is mundane both in the voice and to the ear.
That Christmas, though, when I was deep in the blissful no o’clock time the radio spat to life and broke the silence. It doesn’t startle you. You’re used to the calm being broken. It wasn’t a dispatcher assigning a call to a car or a car calling to a dispatcher. It was a car-to-car call.
It was a call to me.
“Six-L-Eleven, One-L-Twenty-Seven,” I heard.
After a moment, I keyed the radio mic and responded, “L-Eleven . . . go ahead Twenty-Seven.”
One-L-Twenty-Seven was a friend of mine. We worked in different areas, but had gotten to know each other over time, initially from rolling on calls that required multiple units for back up situations or to flood in on something bad. Turned out we liked each other. A friendship grew.
His initial call out to me wasn’t as flat as usual. There was something with a little tint to it. Almost like there was, for lack of any better word I can think of, a hint of mirth. Small in modulation, but large to my ear.
There was the usual moment of space between my acknowledgement of his call to me before he responded. Then, I heard, in a voice that lacked your standard cop-mundane timbre, but held something I wasn’t quite fathoming. It had a certain lightness to it.
This is what I heard.
“Merry Christmas!” and after a brief sliver of a second, “And a Happy New Year to you!”
During my time as a cop I had never, ever heard such a thing on a Christmas shift. Nothing even close.
My body reacted like I had just rolled down the window on my moving squad car and was greeted with a brick of cold air. It took me a moment to recover. Then I stammered.
“M-m-m-m Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you, too, Twenty-Seven.” Then I rushed in a heartfelt, "Hey, make that a very Merry Christmas to you!! And, the same for your New Year!!”
My voice shocked me. The tone wasn’t something I would have expected. I was actually dumbfounded that what I said was done in such a voice on a police radio. It sounded caring. My God, it was caring. I had embarrassed myself. Then, in a snap, I realized I didn’t care what anybody thought. It’s something, isn’t it, our emotions are stocked on the shelves of our mind so haphazardly sometimes.
And with that, as quickly as it happened, our exchange was over. I sat there a bit stunned. A sugar plum. Did that really just happen?
Then, just a few moments later, and only a few moments later, the radio absolutely exploded with sound, and I mean just exploded.
“Six-L-Eleven, Six-L-Eighteen, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!”
“Five-L-Twenty-Three, Five-L-Fifteen, hey, have a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year!”
“Three-L-Thirty-one, Four-L-Nineteen, Merry, Merry Christmas!”
“Two-L-Twelve, One-L-Thirty, hey, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you!”
“Five-L-Sixteen, Three-L-Twenty-six, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year to you and yours!”
“One-L-Seventeen, Two-L-Forty-four, Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year!”
And on and on it went.
All the different numbered Ls were chucking aside their Christmas solitude and laughing and shouting and wishing each other a wonderful holiday. As for me, well, there was no reticence on my part, and I joined into the fray with greetings to those I was friends with and those I respected. It was a loud, raucous display of cheer and good spirit in a place that was unimaginable. It shouldn’t have been there, but it was.
As quickly as it started was almost as quickly as it faded. The radio went silent. I don’t know how long it lasted, it couldn’t have been long, but what ever the duration it was the sweetest of sounds. No choir or symphony or popular singer could have done better.
Now, I suppose my eyes could have moistened, water even collecting at the rims. Maybe a tear might have dropped. But, as there were no witnesses, who was there to make the accusation that it did happen. And even though the squad car was beat up, the car’s heater was working well. With that, and a quick swipe of a hand, any evidence would have been quickly erased from the scene.
However, a soft, small smile did crease my face and stay there. Nothing grand or beaming, just a wee bit of a smile, as if I was by myself and had just remembered something from long ago that had once tickled my fancy. Just a thought, momentary in nature, but clear and bright on a silent night.
I drove on, rolling my squad car slowly through the no o’clock and the deserted streets with a warmth I hadn’t noticed before. But like I said, the car’s heater was working pretty well that night.
It was, as it turned out, one of my favorite Christmas memories.
Ever.
[END]
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