Over the past couple of days, J and I have made a couple of trips on the subway – one to meet up with my sister Jessica and my nephew Levi, who’s finishing up his first year at Julliard, and the other to have dinner with friends in Chelsea.
I’d forgotten a few little details that immediately came back into evidence. One is “track work.” Particularly up in the elevated sections of the number 2 train line in the Bronx, where we are staying, there seems perpetually to be track work going on. Track work as in, “Ladies and gentlemen, please plan ahead. Midday, late nights and weekends, please expect delays, due to regularly scheduled track work. We thank you for your patience.”
These words are spoken (and have been being spoken for the past ten years or so) by a recorded voice, in perfect diction. I guess the incomprehensible sound of actual human voices became too unbearable, so they replaced it with the nice man’s voice. He also says things like, “Ladies and gentlemen, please be careful of the gap between the train and the platform” and “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”
The Giant Track Rats are something else I hadn’t thought of in quite some time. As we waited to transfer to the 2 train at 96th Street, I proposed a game to J. “Let’s play, ‘Spot the Giant Track Rat.’ Whoever sees one first wins a prize." Sure enough, once the tracks were clear, J. won the game, spotting a GTR making off with what looked like a giant bag of popcorn someone had dropped on to the tracks. Despite being the "winner," J's face paled a bit. "That's disgusting," she said.
I couldn't disagree.
And that’s the other big thing I had forgotten: the gastronomy of the New York City Subway system. Almost every train car, at any time of the day or night has someone eating something. And I’m not just talking about someone sneaking a Snickers bar here and there. I am talking about full-on meals, washed down by giant cans of green tea or Budweiser tall boys poorly disguised in brown paper bags. Someone should do a cookbook based on a survey of favorite subway meals. I think it would be a pretty interesting international menu.
At first, I was a little mortified being back on the “iron horse,” as a friend used to call it. Once I was in my 30’s and moved out of Manhattan to Brooklyn, the subway lost its glamor. And once J. hooked her wagon to my star, and we started making offspring, we bought a car and said “Deuces” to the NYC Public Transit System.
But tonight I did sort of sit back at one point and look around at the dirty floors, and up at the ads for “Torn Earlobe” and Erectile Dysfunction treatments with a measure of nostalgia, and when I caught my reflection in the darkened glass of the window inside the tunnel, I saw that even though the man looking back at me was balder, fatter, and grayer than the one who used to look back, when this was my daily mode of getting from here to there, he was smiling, much as he did way back then.
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