A Daily Reminder

The other day, I got off the subway at Herald Square, as I now do each morning. I was consciously ignoring my inappropriate weekday hangover, which is not necessarily an unusual occurrence. Wobbling through the obstacle course of stairways and turnstiles that leads to the exit of the “Manhattan Mall” building, I finally made it to the street after being poked, pushed and stepped on by the groggy mob around me. I’m fundamentally confused by the attempt to have a condensed version of a suburban shopping mall in the middle of Manhattan. I have decided that it makes the commuters feel more comfortable once they show up in the city for work. Sure, you may have JCPenney out on Long Island or in New Jersey, but the feeling of superiority that can be earned by waiting in much longer lines and paying higher sales tax in the city makes all the difference. There are certain cultural activities that unite the bridge and tunnel crowd, which I am unable to comprehend, and this is definitely one of them. At 8:30 in the morning though, nobody is shopping yet. Everyone is in a mad dash to find a source of caffeine before beginning the daily self-betrayal of long-term employment.

There is a certain peacefulness that exists in the act of being carried along in the current of human beings rushing down the sidewalks of Midtown like a steady stream of water. At this time of the day, everyone is determined and united with a common purpose. This enervated singular mindset prevents much of the unpleasantness that is possible after several cups of coffee and a street-cart danish. Unlike the chaos that comes at other times of the day when everyone has energy, the pre-9:00 rush is a sacred time reserved for the workforce of the city in which a universal objective unites us. The key to a peaceful coexistence is chronic fatigue and the hope that no matter how late we left our apartments, we will somehow make it to work on time and perpetuate the illusion that we are, indeed, responsible adults for at least one more day.

I started a new job recently, which means the creation of a new routine. For the past three years, I had my set path from the train to work. There were the familiar strangers I not only expected to see, but looked for in the mornings. There was the donut cart on the corner outside of Penn Station, the one that always charged me a different price for the same Boston creme donut depending on who was shut in behind the glass. There was the window full of fancy cupcakes on 8th Avenue that I always meant to try, but never did. There was the old man that stood barefoot smoking his cigarette in the same doorway every day who I named Fred. There was also the smiling green-eyed Halal meat seller who would sing cheerful songs in Arabic while chopping vegetables and heating his burners for another day’s crop of gyros. I’m sure they’re all still there, carrying on as before, but I am not. I wonder if anyone misses me as part of their own little morning inventory of strangers. Was I part of someone’s tally, or did I just blend into the clockwork mechanism of the Manhattan mornings without making a mark? I wonder.

When I was younger, I never thought of myself as a person who could be comfortable establishing such predictable morning rituals. I used to fancy myself an unapologetic “non-conformist” who would rather die than get caught get trapped in a pattern. Such arrogant thoughts are common in your early twenties. Although I’m not too much further along in my own timeline, now that I look back on it, I’m not quite sure what I was so afraid of. I’ve learned that it’s never wise to spend too much time considering the logic of post-adolescence. Now, I have come to enjoy discovering the patterns that will repeat and form the memories that will become my nostalgia that is cherished later on in life. All of these little things in our routines become part of the stories that we tell, and the stories that we tell become the larger parts of us that extend further beyond our own limited existence, and perhaps for some of us, they will outlive us when we’re gone. A story always becomes richer with repetition, and so does the experience of seeing the same series of things again and again over time. They somehow become more “your own” that way, and I’ve learned to value that phenomenon.  

Now, each morning, as I march into Herald Square with the legions of Midtown, I’m greeted with a view of the Empire State Building reaching far up into the sky, sometimes even gobbled up by low-hanging clouds near the spire. After living in the city for a few years, some of the magic of things which express the canned technicolor ideal of New York-ness have faded a bit for me, but I still get butterflies in my stomach when I walk in the shadow of that building. To me, it’s a firm reminder that no matter what discouragement may befall me, I’ve already come this far, and that alone is reason enough to keep moving upward. You can see the building’s silhouette poking out of the horizon from almost anywhere in Manhattan, watching over everything, keeping it all together. All the the pieces of my routine; the anecdotes, the high notes, the minor disasters and the rhythm that comes with the repetition, they all revolve around this glistening tower, watching over me like God. Sometimes, we all need a reminder of our purpose, and I am lucky to see mine every morning as I trudge forward in the mundanity of my little office job that allows my self-delusions of being a starving “artist” to move onward, and my own New York story to continue ... at least for another pay period.

A collection of momentary romances...

The Harlem sky from my bedroom window.

It is true that I fall in love at least a dozen times a day, sometimes more depending on how many subway rides I might take. Some of these little romances take place for 30, 60, even 90 seconds. Some can last as long as an entire commute if I'm lucky, but they all end in relatively the same way. One moment I'll be sitting (or more often standing and bracing myself against a pole, trying to avoid the sharp elbows and shoulders of others around me) with my nose in a book, and then I'll look up as I turn the page and catch my eye on a person for whom my heart melts like hot butter. Almost as quickly as they appear, they just as easily disappear and then the day continues on...

The violinist:

One evening while changing trains in the labyrinth of tunnels that are tangled beneath the 42nd Street (Times Square) subway station, I took the immense transverse that runs beneath 7th and 8th Avenues. There are times of the day when the maze of tiled passages contain streams of tens of thousands of people all scurrying about rapidly in different directions like ants coming up out of a crack in the earth. There is always the distinct smell of ancient grime, mechanical exhaust and fried food that expands and contracts depending on the weather. Within this vast network of chutes and ladders one can find a wide variety of entertainment from performers to evangelists hoping to make any sort of dent in this ceaseless rumble of footsteps and voices echoing below the city's surface.

At one point there is a very long and steep ramp that runs between the number 7 Train and the A Train. It is lined with mosaics and often with large posters advertising current Broadway shows that can be seen on the streets just above. On this particular evening, I had run out of batteries on my iPod, and as a result, I was unusually more attentive to the sounds around me than I would be otherwise. From the bottom of the great ramp, I could hear something in the distance which was sweet and melodic cutting through the thunder of stampeding humans bounding down the tunnel ahead. It was the faint sound of a violin, singing a sadly beautiful theme. There are often musicians and beggars who frequent this corridor, but rarely do any sound quite as gracefully as what I was vaguely hearing from afar. My pace quickened as I headed forward with curiosity into the great crowd around me. My heartbeat began to hasten as I recognized the tune playing was Chopin's Nocturne. As I drew closer, it echoed through the walls of the tunnel, transforming it into a concert hall rather than a dirty metro station. The tune was being performed with such intimate familiarity that it sounded mournfully sublime. Finally, I was close enough to catch a glimpse of the musician.

He was a smallish man, probably in his mid 30's. He was clean and simple looking. His eyes were closed and his expression was fixed somewhere inside of his mind. He had a black violin case lined with red velvet opened in front of him, and passersby had dropped a few small bills and coins inside. For the most part, he was passed by without a great deal of attention, for after all, a subway station is not a place one generally goes to doddle. Although I had somewhere to go and a train to get to, I stopped for several minutes and listened as he continued to play. If he would have asked me at that moment, I would have surely agreed to marry him, but his eyes never really opened and his awareness of anything but his music didn't seem to falter. Reluctantly, I left after depositing into the velvet-lined case all the change I could find in my pockets (probably amounting to about $1.25). As I turned the corner and the sound of his music faded into the sea of strangers passing by, I made my way to the Uptown A Train with a smile on my face and song that repeated in my head throughout my journey home.

The artist:

There is a section of the A Train that runs express (without stopping) from 59th Street Columbus Circle to 125th Street in Harlem. It is one of the longest singular uninterrupted runs one can take on the New York City Subway. If things are running smoothly, which is often a gamble, from stop to stop it takes about 8 or 9 minutes. This gives one enough time to get involved in some sort of diversion that can make the trip more pleasant, if not interrupted by preachers, political activists, performers or starving mothers begging for change. After a long day of work and running around the city, it's a little treat I often look forward to. I've seen so many peculiar and noteworthy things during this special ride that I could expound for volumes, but at the moment one particular story stands out.

It was one night when I had met a friend for a beer after work at one of those chintzy little Irish pubs that line the streets outside of Penn Station. Was it the Molly Wee Pub, The Blarney Stone or perhaps the Tempest? I'm not quite sure. All I remember is that I had a couple of good stouts in me and I was feeling hopeful about the world. I got on the uptown A Train at 34th Street and by 42nd Street, a group of fashionable young girls got on in my car and took a seat across from me. They all had thick Boston accents, and in their "foreign" dialect, they chattered about nothing of consequence, but the sounds and phrases they used were quite entertaining to me. One of the girls had a particularly flashy pair of boots on, something one would probably find in a mall somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, complete with all sorts of dazzle that made a sure statement of taste. Despite this, and perhaps because of the warm glow I was feeling from the Guinness I had been sipping just moments before, I decided I'd withhold judgment and observe the entertainment before me without expending the unnecessary energy required to mock silently in my own stream of consciousness (or at least I kept it to a bare minimum).

We had passed 59th street, making our way on the long uninterrupted express journey to Harlem, just as one of the girls started talking about something related to Baseball that began to derail my interest. I noticed a hand moving ever so quickly across a page out of the corner of my eye. I discovered a dark thin man in shabby jeans with ink-stained fingers sitting a few seats away from me on the same side of the train car. He had a head full of curly black hair that was pulled back into a little pony tail, revealing a square jaw and a long angular neck. I looked down and saw that he had also made notice of the ridiculous boots of the Bostonian girl in front of us, and he was quickly trying to capture them in a drawing with his pen. He had written some sort of caption above, which I was not close enough to see, but I hoped it said something like "Boston Bedazzled." From what I could see, his line quality and style were reminiscent of Egon Schiele (one of my favorite artists) and for the next 4 minutes I had fallen in love. In my head, Franz Liszt's Liebestraum played, and the rest of the ride was a joy until, inevitably, I had to get off at 125th street and head home to my apartment with visions of the curly haired artist accompanying me along the way. I never saw him again, nor the girls from Boston, but just the same, I'd fallen in love for a good several minutes of my commute which is more than most can hope for in a week.

The Google lackey:

Manhattan decidedly has now joined the world of the tech industry with several large Silicon Valley entities setting up sad little East Coast satellites in old industrial buildings that had seen much better days long ago. It wasn't enough that we in New York had to control publishing, news media, the stock market, the fashion industry, the art world and a number of other trades, but now we've got our fingers in the ever expanding world of the intangible "tech bubble." Situated in Chelsea, in the old Port Authority of New York building, the fortress of Google looks out over the Hudson river, developing new ways to add the woes of New Yorkers to a collection of monetizable analytics. In this relatively new fortress exists an army of awkwardly intelligent minions that can be often recognized without a great deal of effort. They're generally a shade or two more pale than the average person, with insect-like reflexes, a style of dress that reminds one of the folks seen waiting in line at the last Star Wars premiere, and then there's the unmistakable Google lanyard many of them forget to conceal when they leave the building (although I think that some of them purposefully display it as a badge of honor).

One morning, as I stumbled upon the train to work, bleary from an eventful night before, I happened to get squished quite compactly into a very full car. Some insufferable old woman demanded to change seats after the train had already begun moving, which stirred the condensed soup of people into new directions of consolidation. As a general understood rule of train etiquette, once the train begins moving, wherever you have found yourself, you will remain until at least the next stop. The only people who are exempt from this rule are the elderly and Eastern Europeans who just can't seem to get it together on rapid transit. In all the commotion I found myself pushed up against a tall thin man with glasses and a backpack with a water pouch built in. He had the first three signs of Google: the pallid skin, the Lord of the Rings T Shirt and the most definitive - the multicolored and iridescent Google lanyard! My face suddenly found a great smirk growing across it, although I knew not why. I thought to myself, "What about this person makes me chuckle? Sure, he was probably a member of his High School's Audio Visual Club and he probably has a collection of Babylon Five DVD's in his apartment, but how is that so different than me? After all, I was in my school's Lunchtime Library Book Group (which had about 5 members) and I have a whole collection of Woody Allen films in my own apartment that I've memorized forward and backward..."

As I had this little existential debate in my own head regarding which person's brand of nerdiness was more noble, I noticed that Google boy had a pair of very beautiful green eyes behind his glasses. In fact, with less hair gel and perhaps a more neutral T Shirt, Google boy would have been very handsome. Then I looked down and saw that he was reading a biography of Beethoven which made me think of my favorite Beethoven piece, the 2nd movement from Sonata Number 8 (the Pathetique). In realizing that our mutual brands of nerd-dom had found a middle ground, I found Google boy to be quite loveable. For the next two minutes, I debated whether or not backpacks with water reservoirs inside were really so aesthetically bad. As the crowd expanded and contracted at the next stop, he was wrenched from my sight, but throughout the rest of that day, bleary as I may have been, I had a new appreciation for Google.

• • •
There are many other stories I could tell, but these give a small sprinkling of what awaits passengers on the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York. I'm not sure what the moral of the story may be, or if there really ought to be one, but suffice it to say that the older I become, the less I can control my own ability to fall madly in and out of love within the duration of a train ride. Some of these little experiences offer me insights into myself, others offer me warnings about myself, but mostly they are a good source of entertainment that I couldn't imagine finding anywhere else.