View from the Subway Car Leaving the Brooklyn Bridge Station
And, as in fleeting moments such as this, my camera, still around my neck but achingly turned off and not in my hands, does not capture the sight of the middle-age black man, too well-dressed to be identified immediately as homeless, but perhaps so, for as the crowd around him on the platform packs into the cars and ebbs away from him, he is exposed like seaweed washed up with the rising tide only to then be abandoned later upon the shore, revealing to the eyes of some, his cautious yet thorough look within the trash can, hands and fingers carefully moving aside papers and the debris of the city life of others as he searches, but then as the number 5 train pulls out of the Brooklyn Bridge station in Manhattan, my view of him is soon and almost immediately taken away, blurred into the moving, living brush strokes of numerous other figures, blended and lost within the station’s shadows and points of light now rushing past, as the train carries me into the tunnel on my express way to the 86 Street station.
Glimpses of Sparsely Populated Stations Hurtling Towards the 86 St. Station
Sitting there in the gentle rocking light of the subway car, hurtling through the darkness and racing past stations where the express does not stop. Always it seems these stations are almost empty and mournful, abandoned, as if they know the fast ones don’t stop at all here anymore. Perhaps it is the time I travel, maybe a train just left, the isolated figure there, the lonely man here, the older woman in the blue coat that would have looked better in red, moving off that way on the platform, life seen but not touched, out of reach, and to me always sad, but I don’t know why. Always, since a boy, fascinated by being in one place one moment and then somewhere else the next, never quite understanding the concept of time. A fascinating point of view, but a mere idle sideshow to those habituated to not looking or to always seeing naught.
Like a ride on the subway, my daughter said goodbye to me in the tiny kitchen of their apartment while I was making tea, as she was off to work in Manhattan. At one moment, she was ten months old and I was gently dropping dry brittle brown Southern California autumn leaves upon her as she crawled on the front grass of the house we had just moved into, her birth making our first little house even smaller for her two older sisters and us. Now she leaves to hurtle before me through the tunnels into Manhattan. A commuter ride, one moment, one year there, the next moment here on her morning way to over there, a there so different from what I remember as here.
After a certain point in time, after a certain age, there does not seem that much difference between a moment and a year. And yes, there isn’t much space between the two, not much more distance than the space between two words on a page, for a year, or even a lifetime, becomes but a moment at some other point in time.
How does that all happen? I don’t know, a man of my age, after all these years, I don’t know. As she said goodbye, there was a smile upon her lips, a play within her eyes, which deeper down was not a smile or of play. For upon her face…sensitive, caring, and open…within her eyes…a reflection…when at ten-years old of her welling pain and concern early on a sunny Christmas morning, she heard and beheld the little dog entangled in our front camellia bushes gently whimpering, captured and held by strands of Christmas lights entwined upon him by his nighttime run through the decorations of other neighbors’ yards and bushes…her look going backward, staying right there in the now, feeling forward to something else to come…or not to come, I…don’t know. I don’t know what I sense, what impression I have of her…expression, of what was within the smile, or may have been upon her lips but not within her eyes, or what words may come within the days of this trip, of this visit, days like a succession of packed subway cars racing through a station.
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