Subway Ride

Dear Kid, 

Thanks so much for your email. I’m happy that you and Dalia are housed together in Bunk 1; glad Ava is fun and good at teaching wet-hair-towel-wrapping techniques; and very sorry about the food and the mattresses. Last night when I was having dinner (chicken caesar salad) I was remembering that you and I would normally be eating kale pasta (it was Monday), and I missed you. That said, I’m glad you’re at Wricampia and glad you can spend time writing and glad you have electives like boating and the graphic novel and glad you can be with Dalia and glad you can make new friends like Ava. 

Not much of note has happened in the 24 or so hours since your green bus left for the Poconos from the Upper West Side. So I’m going to write about a subway ride I took this weekend that I found diverting. 

I rode a southbound Q from Atlantic Yards/Barclays Center to Cortelyou Road. It was early Saturday evening, around 6:30 p.m. I stood at the platform spot we use on Tuesday and Thursday mornings to get to your bus stop at the Cortelyou library branch, entering a car near the wooden platform benches (one facing the southbound trains, one facing the northbound) so that we can exit near the Cortelyou station stairwell. The car was crowded enough so that I had to stand but empty enough to offer plenty of choices; I held a pole at the midway point of a long bench (with space for four on each side of the pole), facing the car’s rear. Directly in my eye line, at the pole near the doors, stood a mom and her two boys, maybe 8 and 6. The mom -- African-American, in her 30s, I guessed, thick-set, with delicate features that sagged with fatigue -- gripped in one hand a large shopping bag and the handle bars of two scooters, bending a bit to keep their wheels on the ground; her other hand held the center pole. Another shopping bag, filled with clothes or sporting goods or groceries, I couldn’t tell, slumped on the ground, its contents set to topple. The subway made the easing sound that indicates imminent take-off. “Hold on,” the mom instructed the younger boy, whose tight afro featured on each side delicate spirals cut with a razor. The boy stumbled back, almost into me, before catching his balance. “You need to hold on,” his mother said. His older brother (thinner, more athletic) said, “You fell!” pointing with his left hand and keeping his right hand cocked on his hip, swaggering. “You almost fell down!” The younger boy said something I didn’t catch. When the mom said to the older boy, “You need to hold on, too,” he took a minute, turning his hips toward her, left arm dangling, right arm cocked, a stance that said: What are you going to do about it? I couldn’t see his mom’s face, but, a second later, when the boy’s right hand darted from his hip to the pole that he held tight for the rest of the ride, I imagined her expression. 

At that point my attention swerved to a group of four on the bench to my left. On the far end, sitting nearest the doors, a man in his 30s (dark mop of hair, stubble shadowing his jawline, dark soft round eyes) roused himself from what may have been a nap when a man sitting at the center pole (similar age, taller, thin, with narrow dark eyes and a hawk-like nose and similarly dark tousled hair) leaned over the two people between them to say hello. They began to banter in a language I couldn’t catch. They were clearly chummy but not intimate -- I guessed friends from the neighborhood. Tall Guy leaned over, stretched a long arm to share a soft handshake with Soft-Eyes Guy, then introduced the man to his left: a square-shouldered, thick-torsoed man with razor-short hair who spent the ride leaned forward, forearms on his thighs, a posture he barely budged to exchange greetings and a much firmer handshake with Soft-Eyes. Tall Guy and Soft-Eyes continued a chat that lasted the rest of my ride, interrupted by an occasional grunt or quick comment from Stocky Guy. I was trying to catch their language (Italian?) but was distracted by the person sitting between Stocky Guy and Soft-Eyes: a woman, a generation older (late 50s? early 60s?), who wore a square-cut gray dress with a drab pattern that perhaps came from a 1960s Sears catalog or a picked-over department store in the former Soviet Bloc. She had no obvious make-up, wavy gray curls cut sensibly short, and a doughy face marked with small, sharp brown eyes. On almost no evidence, I guessed she was Soft Eyes’ mother; they sat close, and his left arm occasionally touched her as he gesticulated. But she was never introduced, and she never acknowledged either Soft Eyes nor the two gentlemen to her right; during the entire conversation she stared straight ahead. (Russian: that was the language they were speaking.) At first I thought the woman’s stare was blank, and I wondered if she were somehow mentally incapacitated, until I saw her eyes dart to a conversation near the doors and realized she wasn’t missing a thing.

I followed her gaze to the 6-year-old, trying to tell his mother something. I heard him utter a single phrase at least six times in rapid succession: “And then I saw...” It came out “AndthenIsaw/AndthenIsaw/AndthenIsaw/AndthenIsaw/ AndthenIsaw/AndthenIsaw...,” like a record with a scratch forcing the needle back to its starting point. The mother, still and calm as a pond, said, “Take your time. Stephen. You have all the time you need.” Stephen inhaled, started over, and moved right past it: “And then I saw another boy jump off the stairs...” 

I felt moved to say something to the mother, along the lines of: “I really appreciate the way you parent these boys.” But I imagined how that exchange might play out: “What are you doing listening to a private conversation?” And who was I to provide her with approbation? Why did she need a strange 53-year-old man telling her he thought she was doing a great job? At the same time I felt sad to stay silent, as if it were a loss -- a flaw in our American society, somehow -- that I couldn’t easily share with this fellow traveler my admiration. 

Just then a couple ran onto the car, barely beating the closing doors. They were in their late teens or early 20s, both laughing, full of energy and the promise of a summer night. The young man (boy, really) had short blond curls and a sharp-cut, sheeny suit; the young woman (younger than he, I thought) had long straight blond hair, a tight-fitting sleeveless light-blue dress cut mid-thigh, and a diaphanous orange scarf that fluttered behind with her flowing hair. Large-eyed, out of breath, they flowed past the mother and her boys, past the Russians, past me, up the car, seeking seats. The entire car’s energy shifted; even the people whose eyes didn’t follow them (and most everyone’s did, including the two young boys’ and the Russian mother’s) felt their rush of arrival, felt the wake of their heedless youth, felt, I calculated, envious or pitying or irked or regretful. I felt none of those things. I felt happy to be on the Q, happy to be among a crowd of Brooklynites, happy to be alive and alert to the ceaseless carnival of a summer Saturday night in the city. 

And then I darned near missed my stop. 

I love you, Kid! Hope your first full day of Wricampia has been a blast. 

Love,

Daddy