(Originally published 3/25/19)
Yesterday
was a pleasant early spring day. There were more tourists in the vicinity of
Battery Park than I anticipated. Is spring break or some such holiday
responsible for the teeming masses? Whatever the case, there was an overall
calm in the relatively speaking—for this time of year—warm air.
Even my downtown
and uptown subway trips were uneventful—no sense of menace in either of them.
The only panhandler I encountered was a familiar face. It was the young fellow
who—several weeks earlier—was insulted by a hoity-toity, dismissive woman who
had, in fact, given him a dollar. She, though, expected more bang for her buck
than he was willing to give. The lady wanted him out of her personal space and on
his merry way—toot sweet. A dollar does not buy what it once did. The
man returned the money. This morning, his pitch was the same as before,
noting—among other things—that he was embarrassed doing what he was doing and
that the price of a breakfast sandwich with coffee was approximately four
dollars, which sounded about right.
I provided
him half the price of a breakfast, and a fellow straphanger contributed as
well. At the time, I was riding in the first car and the guy arrived from the
adjoining one. This told me that he had worked the downtown train from last to
first. He therefore had no place to go after this final appeal and decided to
take a load off his feet. The problem—from his perspective—was that the train
was meandering through a work site at the time—track replacement—and its operator
was periodically laying on its exceptionally loud horn. “That’s unacceptable!” the man said with palpable agitation as he made an about-face and hurried away from the
horn’s epicenter.
In the beginning there is a train operator entering his cab...and let the good times roll.
And a conductor in the middle of the train who must point at a hanging black-and-white striped board—a zebra board—at every station, which indicates the proper alignment of cars.
Yesterday with spring in the air and with a spring in my step, I decided to go back to the basics. To the point of no return!
This has got to be one of the toughest jobs...
To work in perpetually loud, dreary tunnels with a never-ending stream of unpredictable—and often incredibly angry and sometimes unhinged—riders.
In just a few months this marina will be full. For now, it has gone to the birds.
The Hudson River Sea monster migrates north each spring. The In Search Of... cameras cannot be far behind.
Modern architecture just leaves me cold.
Yes, here is the hip eatery that never fails to remind me of my hospital stay and being asked to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. The higher numbers got me two Percocet tablets instead of one. What is a communal table?
Blue on blue, heartache on heartache.
One Dalmatian...
That is another one out there...
Even grandpa is scrolling and texting these days.
This was the one and only oddball I observed on my journey. He quietly scribbled along for a bit and then—with no prompting—began raving about how the military stole some of his best ideas. I will take a conspiracy theorist over a Charles Manson-type any day of the week.
