All posts by Jacquelin Cangro

 

My favorite part of the ride

This is my favorite part of the ride. I’m taking the Q train home from the city.

We start a slow incline out of the tunnel from Canal Street to cross the Manhattan Bridge to the Brooklyn side. The tracks carry us over Chinatown. From here, without the putrid smells and incessant horn honking, it looks inviting. The red signs with gold Chinese lettering decorate every storefront. Vendors spill out onto the narrow, winding streets, hawking their cheap kitsch for tourists. Fresh laundry blows on a line leading from an open window.

Then the East River is below and the downtown city skyscrapers come into view. The sun is setting on the other side of the Hudson River casting a cotton candy glow around the skyline. I always try to spot the Trinity Church spire. It’s not easy to find. Long overtaken by steel and glass around it, it was once the tallest building in New York. If I look down, I can see the Fulton Fish Market. After almost 200 years of operation from the Lower East Side, the fish mongers have moved to a new facility in the Bronx. The trains usually slow to a crawl about halfway over the bridge, and today is no exception. A biker on the path next to the train is keeping pace.

It gives me time to check out the venerable Brooklyn Bridge just to the south. The lights trimming the tension wires are twinkling in the dusk. Its stone-and-mortar construction makes it unique among all the bridges connecting to Manhattan, but I think New Yorkers are so fond of it because it was first.

Brooklyn comes into view with comparatively low buildings, just a little higher than the train windows. As we begin the descent into the tunnel, I can see Fulton’s Landing, a now grassy spot where General George Washington, outmanned and outgunned by the British pressing down from the hill above in the Battle of Brooklyn, stole away in the middle of the night avoiding capture and kept the Americans’ hopes for independence alive. There is a small playground painted in primary colors next to the landing area and a boy is being pushed on a swing by his mother.

New construction rises next to old graffitied buildings. A clock tower is on top of one of the many loft buildings that are being converted from warehouses and factories as people rediscover the neighborhood of DUMBO. It’s 4:30. We slide into the tunnel and I’m almost home.

 

Solidify

It isn’t often that I get a seat on the way home from work.

By happenstance, today I am standing in front of someone who vacates her seat at Park Place. You can’t hesitate for a moment if you want a seat on a crowded train. Polite people stand a lot.

I’m engrossed in my latest read, Eat, Pray, Love, when the woman to my left asks me a question.

“Do you know what this word means?” She points to solidify in her book. She has a pleasingly round face and shaved head with a five o’clock shadow. The lack of hair makes her pink lipstick stand out against her chocolate skin.

“It means to make stronger.”

We smile at each other and return to our books. After a long day at work (and let’s face it, every day at work is a long day), I’m not in the mood for idle chit chat with strangers. I wish it could come naturally for me to be one of those people who love people, but I have to work at it. I make a New Year’s Resolution every January 1 to be friendlier to random strangers, and by January 5, I’m hoping another Blanche DuBois-type depending on the kindness of strangers doesn’t disturb me from my book.

Then the woman says, “I’m going to write that down in the back of my book so I don’t forget it.” She flips the pages to show me a long list of words on which she needed clarification.

I nod, unsure what else to say, and give her my polite this-conversation-has-run-its-course look. But she hits me with a question out of left field. “How do you know if you’re a visual or aural learner?”

I’m stumped. I don’t know how you know, but you just do. “I guess whichever comes easier for you.”

“Which one are you?”

Now this seems a bit personal. I glance out the window to see that we are only at Clark Street, a full six stops from home. There’s no way to end it politely, so I give in and close my book. “I’m definitely a visual learner.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I’d rather read directions rather than hear them, for example.”

She writes this down, too. It seems that she is also a visual learner, but she just doesn’t realize it. Her face really is pleasant and she gives off a kind vibe, not a creepy one. “Do you have any tips for taking a test? I’m always looking for tips.”

It’s been many years since I’ve taken any tests. The last one, to complete my master’s degree, was a horror show one essay question from each of seven courses completed. We were allotted one hour per question to write our answers in blue books. Remembering it even now makes me shudder the studying, the aloofness from professors, the pressure.

But it wasn’t too long ago that I gave tests as an adjunct instructor at a local college. I try to tell her what I would have told my students. “Be confident and don’t second-guess your answers. Your first instinct is nearly always right.”

She goes on to tell me how inspired she is by the book she’s reading and since she’s read all three books by the author, she doesn’t know what she’ll read when she’s done. So now she’s trying to read very slowly. She also thanks me for talking to her. “You know, every time I get on the train I ask God to put me next to someone smarter than me. I’m trying to learn all of the things I didn’t learn when I was younger. I know I’m kind of old for this. It’s not easy starting from scratch.”

“No, but you can’t give up. It’s never too late.” The train pulls into Grand Army Plaza and I take my leave of her.

In a ten-minute conversation with a woman I’d never laid eyes on before, and probably never will again, I’ve been reminded to trust my instincts, that smarts don’t only come from a book and the power of tenacity. As it happens, all things on which my soul needed a bit of a refresher.

You can’t get that driving bumper-to-bumper in your SUV now, can you?

 

An idea grows on the subway

One day Genevieve Piturro was riding the subway to her boring day job.

She knew that there was something more for her than being a marketing executive at a large corporation, something she alone was born to do. Genevieve had been spending her spare time with a Manhattan program that organizes volunteers to read bedtime stories to foster children. She was on the right track, but it wasn’t her exact calling. Then the idea came to her while she was lost in thought on the subway: pajamas.

Genevieve had learned that most of the children she read to every night slept in their regular clothes and some didn’t even know what pajamas were. She decided while on the train that she would bring pajamas to her group of foster kids at the shelter. That was five years ago. Now, her non-profit group, Pajama Program, has distributed more than one million pajamas to kids worldwide. And, if you’re in the NYC area, they also have a reading center on 39th Street in the city.

While I’m on the subject of kids and reading, there’s another wonderful non-profit group, near to my heart, designed to put books in children’s hands. It’s Room to Read. Realizing that 115 million children worldwide are not receiving any type of organized education, Room to Read also got involved in building schools and libraries in rural villages. Some of these children have never held a book, never flipped through the pages and magically been transported to another world. Give a kid a book. You can change his life.

So if you’re still lookng for a great way to give back, you can donate new pajamas or books by going to their websites. As for me, I’m going to use my subway time to dream a little bigger in 2008.

 

All the white people, sing!

The day was a “Grid-Lock Alert Day” as if it was special or different from the traffic jams we get most days.

There are about six or seven of these Grid-Lock Alert Days throughout the holiday season in NYC. Some are understandable: the night of the Rockefeller tree lighting or Black Friday, for instance. But this day, who knew?

We were also getting a snowstorm with expected accumulation of about three inches in the city and up to six or seven inches upstate. In NY this didn’t faze us in the least. We were all at work and school and watching the snow come down outside the window. You cannot call out from work, or if you do, plan to use a personal day.

The Grid-Lock Alert and snow combined to make the subway much more crowded than usual. People who might normally drive or take the bus shuffled underground to avoid traffic snarls. On the 2 train we were smooshed together like a threesome in a twin bed, everyone getting a little feisty and irked.

So it is into this environment that a man walked onto the train car, complete with guitar and amplifier to spread some holiday cheer. I couldn’t see him, but he warmed up with some random chords. As soon as the doors close (it’s standard protocol to wait until the doors close), he launched into “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” but with his own twist.

“He sees you when he’s sleeping, little girl in the red coat. He knows when you’re awake, man with the big hat. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, Mr. Wall Street guy, so be good for goodness sake…

“Okay, you know how it goes. Sing along with me. White people, you join in, too!

“Santa Claus is comin’ to town. Oh he surely is. Santa Claus is comin’ to town. Right here to Brooklyn, USA…”

He finished that song and decided, apparently, that the people on this car were collectively not much into the spirit at this hour of the morning. Maybe The Jackson Five would help.

“This one is dedicated to the lady with the glasses.

“You and I must make a pact. We must bring salvation back. Where there is love, lady with the glasses, I’ll be there.

“Sing along with me, lady with the glasses. If you should ever find someone new, I’d know he’d better be good to you.”

The lady with the glasses was not singing along. No one was. But people were chuckling behind their newspapers and books.

“Now, all the white people sing! I’ll be there. I’ll be there. Just call my name, and I’ll be there.”

I left the train and the guy singing, feeling just a little bit better than I did about 30 minutes before.

 

Crime and punishment

Two ladies near me on the Chambers St. platform were discussing the recent tragic events at a Nebraska mall.

They looked like they could be from middle America themselves. One was wearing a red beret and the other wore an oversized sweatjacket with glow-in-the-dark white sneakers.

“What is the world coming to? All those people.” The woman wearing the red beret shook her head.

“And they say New Yorkers are nuts. At least the shooter had the decency to turn the gun on himself. Spare us all some ridiculous alibi about his mental problems,” said pristine sneaker woman.

“Do you think he’ll go to heaven?”

A train on the downtown tracks squeals its brakes and I couldn’t hear the response. The woman in the red beret took up again. “But God forgives everyone who asks for forgiveness.”

The shooter indeed left a note behind in which, among other things, he apologized for what he had been about to do and wrote, “I’ve just snapped.” It made me think about how the word “sorry,” like so many others, has lost its meaning. I think this is due in part to the fact that as a society we seem to enjoy building our heroes up, only to tear them down. Then we expect them to repent, to offer up whatever lame-ass excuse they can find, so we can feel good about liking them again. I offer you a smattering of examples:

– Mel Gibson’s explanation for his anti-Semitic remarks in 2005: "That wasn’t really me, it was the booze talking, I have inner rage, I have a dark side, I’m in rehab."

– After a tabloid photo was published showing model Kate Moss snorting cocaine, she apologized to “all the people I have let down.” Moments it seemed after being released from a rehab clinic she signed contracts with Calvin Klein and Virgin Mobile.

– Years ago when Hugh Grant was caught with prostitute Divine Brown, he went on what many like to call his “mea culpa” tour of talk shows, classifying his cheating on then-girlfriend Liz Hurley as “disloyal and shabby and goatish.” His movie career continues to thrive.  

– Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, who resigned after having an affair with a gay man he hired to serve as the state’s homeland security advisor, at least used the word sorry in his farewell speech: "I am sorry that I have disappointed the citizens of the state of New Jersey who gave me this enormous trust." He went on to say that there is a climate in this country in which "we smile in person and then throw each other under the bus when we leave the room."

I don’t even pretend to know if, like the woman wearing the red beret on the train platform said, God forgives anyone who asks for forgiveness. That’s a topic for a completely different blog. It does suggest that we all crave a second chance. But I wonder if these people are truly sorry for their misactions or if they are just sorry they got caught. Maybe apologizing means never having to say you’re sorry.

 

Is it or isn’t it?

I was riding the 1 train downtown when I spotted a familiar face across the aisle.

He had that air of someone you vaguely remember but haven’t seen in ages. I scanned all of the places I could have met a partially bald, slight man with salt-and-pepper beard: work, coffee shop, library.

Then a name popped into my head. Barry. Barry Lewis! Not exactly an A-list celebrity, I know, but in New York he’s well known for his PBS series, “A Walk Around…” As in “A Walk Around Brooklyn” or “A Walk Around Harlem.” He takes you to places of interest and gives you nuggets of social, political and architectural history with such enthusiasm, I dare you to turn the program off. And here he was on the same train.

I have spotted a few honest-to-God celebrities while riding the subway. Michael Imperioli of The Sopranos and Steve Buscemi come to mind. Steve Buscemi has, shall we say, such a unique look about him that you’re not left wondering if that was really him or just his doppelganger. Because the more I looked (okay, stared) at Barry Lewis, the more I doubted my first judgment.

(My best celebrity sighting hands down was Harrison Ford in the Village. He was heading east on Houston; I was heading west. I turned to search for him in the crowd but he was gone. Like two ships passing in the night. Oh, Han!)

When I got off the train at Chambers to transfer to the 2/3 heading to Brooklyn, Barry stayed on the 1, which terminates in a few stops at South Ferry. Now I truly second-guessed myself. He’s going to Staten Island? That seems crazy.

Robert Lanham has a funny essay in The Subway Chronicles book called Straphanger Doppelganger in which he seeks out his look-alike after numerous friends have mistaken his doppelganger for him. Lanham points out, “According to mythology, a doppelganger is the living incarnation of a person’s dark side. Their shadowy opposite.” Maybe this person who sat across from me was Barry Lewis’s double: a Staten Island-bound, insurance adjuster who didn’t know or care about the difference between Central Park and Bryant Park. Lanham goes on to say that coming to terms with the existence of our nonbiological twin is part of living in New York. In a city this size, everyone is bound to have one.

As if to prove the truth in that statement, today I sat next to an elderly black woman on the commute to work. I might not have noticed her except that she scooted over and motioned for me to sit. She had a calmness and elegance that reminded me of my high school English teacher, Mrs. Sutton. Everything about Mrs. Sutton was grace personified. Her reputation was one of toughness and an unwillingness to compromise. For us seniors, there would be no easy “A”. She wasn’t our friend or confidant; she didn’t stand at the front of the class to entertain us. And I loved her for it. Mrs. Sutton was a big part of the reason I decided to major in English. Lately, another opportunity to second-guess myself.

In the creative arts, one of the few professional tracks where there is a high likelihood that you will never be able to support yourself in your chosen field, it’s easy to doubt your choices and your ability. Maybe doppelgangers don’t always stem from the dark side, the Darth Vaders of the Force. Maybe they appear in order to remind us of someone or something we’d lost track of along the way, giving us an opportunity to reconnect with that part of ourselves we had misgivings about.

 

On a scale of 1 to 5

My HR department sent a company-wide email reminding all employees that annual performance reviews are lurking. We would be concerned if these reviews actually meant something.

If they were used, for example, as a basis for salary increases or promotions, we might take a more hearty interest. They are not. Why, you’d like to know? Having even asked such a question shows that you are thinking along a certain logical path which is clearly at odds with the inner workings of a multi-national, multi-billion-dollar corporation.

So we employees treat the performance reviews with something approaching apathetic carelessness. The paperwork involves listing your professional goals for the coming year, and then, as if HR knows you’re just copying your answers from a website you found, they also require you to list how you’re planning to achieve said goals. Last year I can recall I gave my goals and strategies serious thought while riding the B train on the way in to the office. An advertisement for a local commuter college offered some ideas: “Enroll today and in less than 18 months, you could go from dead-end to high-end.”

Meanwhile, your boss also completes a review of how well you performed in the past year. On a scale of 1 to 5, you are ranked in several categories, including attendance and initiative. Ya-wn. No wonder no one cares. Want the staff to take an interest? Let’s liven things up by selecting more exciting ways to judge the employees’ progress or lack thereof and hand out awards as such.

We might borrow the Straphangers Campaign’s list of categories which they use to rate the bus and train lines. For example, instead of giving the Pokey Award to the slowest bus route (the M23 bus route, by the way, clocked in at a blistering average pace of four mph in 2007), the employee who arrives at his or her desk the latest each morning gets recognized. The prize, an alarm clock, of course. Or the Shleppie Award, given to the bus route plagued with bunching/gaps in service, meaning that two buses might arrive within 30 seconds of each other, then no bus would arrive for about five hours. (The M1 takes home this prize.) At the office, the employee who whiles away the day trolling the Internet, chatting on the phone relaying the same story to everyone she knows, and making twelve trips an hour for coffee before finally settling down to business at 4:36 p.m., and then frantically declaring how frantic she is, wins this prize, which I think would be a swift kick in the ass at 9:01 a.m.

I’m submitting my proposal for a change to the performance review system first thing in the morning. Well, after I get my coffee, make a few phone calls, and surf the Internet a bit.

 

Zen and the art of subway riding

Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh defined mindfulness as keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality. I’ve been working on that; it’s so much harder than it seems.

Focusing on the current moment and not worrying about what comes in the next hour, day, or week is counterintuitive to life in 21st-century New York. (Really, 21st-century anywhere. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that even Easter Island, a place so remote it is 2,500 miles from any other land mass, now has high-speed Internet.) My M.O., I’m embarrassed to say, usually involves something like simultaneously eating dinner with the radio on to hear what’s happening now, watching TV with the sound turned down to get the weather for tomorrow, and reading the newspaper to find out what happened yesterday.

So I’m conducting a small experiment, and I’m doing it on the subway. During a commute I decided I would just ride home. I wouldn’t distract myself from the present reality with a book or music or falling into a strange state of semi-consciousness, a condition that seems to befall me during these winter months when I leave for work in the dark and come home from work in the dark. (Note to self: this topic deserves its own post.)

I tried this twice last week with very interesting results.

Both times I chose the evening commute because it’s the time of day I am in the most need of decompressing. After a hectic and stressful day at the office, I generally spend my subway time in lament of the fools I’ve had to suffer during the day and the ridiculousness that is often the multi-national corporation. (Motto: Red tape is your friend.)

At first I found myself at a loss of where to rest my eyes. The ads rimming the cars only hold your attention for so long. I couldn’t very well overtly look at people. In other places, it’s welcoming and friendly to look someone in the eye. In New York, especially on the subway, it’s an act of aggression. But curiosity killed the cat, as they say, and I ended up stealing glances at people I thought interesting enough to take the risk.

Across from me was a woman reading a magazine. She wore a sort of half grin that never faded, not once during my ride. A green paisley scarf was wrapped around her head in a sort of swashbuckler way. I didn’t see any tendrils of hair peeking out from beneath the scarf, and I couldn’t help but notice that her eyebrows were missing and her skin was completely without the faint peach fuzz we all have but spend a lot of time and money to keep under control. Had I been engrossed in a book or newspaper I would have never noticed. I wanted to tell her, “I see you. You’re not just one of many, part of the masses (leading lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau would point out).” Then my writer’s brain checked in. That’s where I start filling in the blanks when not enough information has been provided to me. Maybe she is in remission after many long months of treatment, thus the smile. A happy secret she has all to herself. Or maybe it’s too late. She’s been given a sentence two weeks, a month, three months. Her smile instead is a wistful one, thinking of all the things she’ll soon miss that she never gave a second thought, like riding the subway for instance.

I transferred to the 2 train, which was oddly empty, so I sat between a woman nodding off and a heavy-set man. Upon further investigation, he wasn’t heavy at all. In fact he was quite thin. He just seemed thick because he was wearing every piece of clothing he owned at least three shirts and two sport coats on top and two pairs of pants, plus several layers of socks. Like a little kid extra-bundled to play in the snow, he couldn’t bend his arms at the elbow. It was definitely chilly outside, but I guessed this was an effort to thwart potential thieves wherever it was he laid his head.

He mumbled something and made a quick exit which gave me the opportunity to notice a mother with a stroller. She was young and pretty and thin, so I immediately thought: nanny. But no. The diamond on her ring finger could have been used as a method of self-defense. She had long, black hair and swung her head in such a way that made me wonder if she had been watching too many Cher videos. But even that didn’t irritate me as much as her need to narrate her every move and schedule for the rest of the day’s events to the little girl, who might have been all of two, in a sing-songy voice at a volume for the rest of the car to hear. “Let me put your binky in my bag. We don’t want to lose it, do we? No, we don’t. I’m just going to put these mittens on you. Okay? Okay. I’ll put the mittens on. Here goes the left one. Putting on the left mitten. Now the right one. Right. Right. Right. I should comb your hair. This is a comb. C-O-M-B. You want to look so pretty for your play date with Tyler, don’t you? I’ll drop you off there and pick you up before dinner. Then we’ll have mashed potatoes, your favorite.” In a few stops, they left the car and I could hear her voice trail all the way down the platform until, mercifully, the doors closed.

I know this isn’t exactly what Thich Nhat Hanh had in mind when he wrote of staying in the present moment. In fact, he admonished people whose minds are like monkeys “swinging from branch to branch throughout the forest.” But I’d like to think he’d cut me a break as a novice on the road to mindfulness.

 

Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

I understand that it’s hard for people who get into their cars and drive to work to sympathize with the plight of the public transit commuter. Take Monday, for instance.

I had to return two heavy and awkward wall shelves to a store in Manhattan . They totaled 22 pounds. When I had purchased the shelves on my lunch hour, I deposited them in my office, and took one home at a time. It seemed like a drawn-out process to do the same on the return trip, and I’d postponed the inevitable long enough that my 30-day refund policy was about to expire. Monday was the day.

For those of you tooling around in a vehicle, you would pop the shelves into the trunk of the car, and this would be the end of the story. But not for me.

I put each shelf into a separate bag, banged them down 5 flights of stairs from my apartment, slugged about one-half mile to the subway station, banged down another flight of stairs underground, and squeezed through the turnstiles.

Did I mention it was raining? Of course it was.

By the time I reached the station the shelves and I were soaking wet (can’t use an umbrella if you’ve got a shelf in each hand). Not giving it a second thought, I’d used paper bags which quickly disintegrated into a soggy mess. So I then hoisted each shelf under an armpit. I was thankful at least I wasn’t wearing light-colored pants which would show every drip and drop of mud below the knees. This is something not mentioned in your “Big Apple Welcome Packet" when you move to the city, but you learn only after a few bad thunder/snowstorms. On the train, I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, propping the shelves up against the pole.

This wasn’t the first time I’d carried a ridiculous item on the subway. One memorable experience involved an aerobed. In the store, the aerobed seemed manageable, light even. The clerk attached those fantastic plastic handles to the box, necessity being the mother of invention in a city where everyone has to carry everything. The subway station was a mere two blocks. I barely made it to the corner before I had to stop to rest, panting and heaving worse than an emphysema patient. When I reached the station and made the long flight down to the turnstile, I gave up. I perched the large box on the edge of the top stair and gave it a swift kick. The box tumbled, flipped and skidded to the first landing. I did it again (it felt so good) to the bottom of the stairs.

A large man, who looked like he burrowed holes in the ground for a living, had been watching me. “Can I help you?”

Sweat dripping down my face and back, I nodded yes. Oh yes! He carried the aerobed through the turnstile and all the way to the platform, then turned and headed back up the stairs to another train line. When I finally got the thing home, pushing it along the sidewalk, I noticed on the side of the box the product weight was 30 pounds.

On Monday no one was offering to help me with my shelves. But I made it. Sure, my mascara was streaming in lines down my cheeks, my hair was a tangled rat’s nest, and my fingers were swollen red sausages, but it didn’t matter. I made it and I vowed right there that on Tuesday I would bring to work nothing larger than my cell phone.

 

A book by its cover

 

I’m rereading In a Sunburned Country, a book by one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson. This book is autographed by him. I’d had the good fortune to attend a recent book signing/reading the only one he’d done in New York City on this tour.

Permit me to digress here on an unrelated note to say that this event was standing room only at least 150 people crammed into a little section of the bookstore. When Bryson appeared and made his way to the podium, the audience gave him a standing ovation before he even said a word. Compare this, if you will, to many Subway Chronicles readings where I’ve actually asked store cashiers to sit in the seats so at least the authors could read to a live person.

If you’ve any familiarity with Bryson’s work, you’ll agree he’s an incredibly astute and humorous writer, honing in on the “everyman” quality of any situation he’s in. It’s not uncommon to be chuckling or suppressing an outright laugh should you find yourself reading his books in public, an experience I had just this morning, which I’ll get to in a moment. Really it couldn’t be avoided as close to 90 percent of my reading is in fact done in public.

My subway commute gives me an hour per day of reading time. Occasionally I read magazines and the free AMNY or Metro newspapers that get shoved into my hand at the station entrances, but most often, I’m reading a book. As a novelist-to-be (Do I say “to be” if I’ve spent six years of my life on the damn thing and am just waiting to hear back from the agent? C’mon Agent, call me!), I’ve got many books in my queue, more than I’ll ever get to in a lifetime, classified as: books I should read (A Tale of Two Cities), books I need to read to stay current (Prep), books I’ve tried to read many times but just can’t seem to connect with (Mrs. Dalloway sorry Virginia Woolf), and books I want to read to complete some sort of compendium (all books by James Thurber, for example).

Another digression: A recent article in Slate queried well-known writers to find out which books they’ve never read but felt they should have. They called it their “gravest literary omissions.” For Amy Bloom, it’s Moby Dick; for Myla Goldberg, it’s To the Lighthouse (another Woolf avoider); for Lucinda Rosenfeld, it’s Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (BTW read her fabulous essay in The Subway Chronicles: Scenes From Life in New York; amazingly for John Crowley, it’s To Kill a Mockingbird. This last one, of course, is really unforgivable. No excuses. Here is an occasion I’d let him slide by just seeing the movie Gregory Peck makes an indomitable Atticus Finch.

I get a lot of reading material suggestions from riding the subway. A few years ago nearly every literate citizen of New York was reading Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. I ran out to buy a copy with the picture of the blurred elevated tracks to see what all the fuss was about. Then you couldn’t throw a Metrocard without hitting the chalkboard-like cover of Me Talk Pretty One Day, a collection of essays by David Sedaris. Or Eat, Pray, Love the title outlined in pasta, prayer beads, and silk fabric is so creative, it compels me to believe the writing is also (which it is), however ridiculous this seems. Lately I feel I can’t escape the little crown-wearing green frog of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Man of My Dreams. I like the frog. It makes me want to read the book.

As I was reading In a Sunburned Country on the 2 train, a passage made an uncontrollable snort issue from the back of my throat. My eyes darted around like the worst espionage spy ever while I sneaked a look to see who might have witnessed my embarrassing outburst. A man sitting in front of me laughed and pointed. I was horrified that I was the object of his ridicule.

“That’s a great read,” he said. “Bryson’s the best.”

I smiled and nodded, satisfied that he was pointing at the kangaroo on the cover and just recalling his own Bryson moment proof that you can judge a book by its cover.

 

Found: $220 million!

 

Toward the end of every year, it seems warnings resume anew about an inevitable fare increase for subway riders.

The discussion between the transit authority, politicians, union groups, and advocacy organizations feels almost scripted.

MTA: Remember that $32 billion we borrowed over the last 25 years? Well, the bill’s coming due. Time to raise fares.

Governor Spitzer: On behalf of all of the low-income workers in New York City, this is an injustice! There must be something we can do. As you know, my proposed legislation to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants failed, so I am jumping on the "no fare increase" bandwagon to divert all of that bad publicity.

Straphangers Campaign: Can’t the MTA wait at least until March 2008 to raise fares? That’s when they submit their five-year, multi-billion dollar capital rebuilding plan for approval. Seems kind of short-sighted to ask for an increase now. Anyone?

Mayor Bloomberg: No comment.

MTA: Wait just a minute! What do we have here? Looks like we found $220 million laying around in this old shoebox marked "Extra money." Guess we don’t need to increase fares in 2008 after all.

Governor Spitzer: Whew! But come to think of it, Albany is running at a $4.3 billion defecit. We should at least raise the unlimited Metrocard fares. Four percent seems like just the right amount not to ruffle any feathers.

Straphangers Campaign: Well that about does it. See you this time next year.

 

Second Avenue line: there’s no telling

A few months ago, an article in The Hartford Courant lamented the question most New Yorkers stopped asking ages ago: "Why does it take so long to get anything built?"

After all, the Empire State Building was built in about 18 months. The entire Erie Canal, trenched out with animals and plows, finished up in 1825, just eight years after they broke ground. Before dump trucks and bulldozers, the city’s first subway line, the IRT running from City Hall to Grand Central over to Times Square and then up to 145th Street with 28 stations, took just four years to complete in 1904.

This recently came to a head as the tunneling for the Second Avenue subway line gets underway after an on-again, off-again relationship that would make Britney and K-Fed’s heads spin. The ceremonial spade has broken ground and two traffic lanes have been closed for the transportation nightmare that will be the estimated five-year, five-billion-dollar project for the first phase.

Maybe this problem is an American one. Phase 1 of the Dehli Metro in India spans 65 km with 59 stations. It was completed in four years for U.S. $2.4 billion. Beijing boasts that their city will have five subway lines when the Olympics opens in 2008. They had only one just a dozen years ago.

This first phase of the Second Avenue line (to be called the "T" line) will link 96th Street to the tunnel already built at 63rd Street with only three new stations. Phase two, well, I’ll keep you in suspense, but rest assured it will take longer and be more expensive. The tunnel at 63rd Street was completed in the 70s. This is a thirty-year gripe in the making, folks. Don’t think the Upper East Siders aren’t going to milk it for all it’s worth.

But really these complaints are nothing new. Turn-of-the-century New Yorkers took plenty of pot shots at the IRT, built speedily by today’s standards. The New York Times reports that "even the workers had stopped trying to bet on when. ‘Anyone who tries to say exactly when this work will be finished,’ one mining forman said, ‘is a blamed fool. There’s no telling.’"

Photo credits: Curbed.com