Train Blogging

It’s Saturday morning and I’m on the train. I’m going to Connecticut to see my mom, who’s in the hospital again. She has advanced ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and can neither move nor communicate. She got terribly sick a couple of days ago and spent a couple of days in a kind of coma, but she’s out of it now and though I’m already tired and this is an exhausting experience, I’m going to say hi and give her a kiss and hold her hand and tell her what I’m up to.

At the train station this morning, in addition to learning that this is National Elevator and Escalator Safety Week (who decides these things anyway? Is anybody checking to see if this is really the case or could I just say that next week is National Duct Tape Appreciation Week put up signs in hardware stores and everybody would just say, “Yeah, okay, duct tape is pretty cool, I guess” and move on unquestioningly?) I was in one of the 7 places in the station where you could buy coffee and a bagel and the loudest alarm I’ve ever heard went off in the store. It was coming from the fire alarm, and though I neither saw nor smelled a fire, I quickly exited in case the sprinklers suddenly came on. Amazingly, nobody else in the store even moved. They kitchen workers glanced around, but kept at their routines. The customers sat at their tables. Mind you, aside from the fact that an alarm is intended to induce, well, alarm, there was a 110 decibel (a logarithmic scale, by the way) high pitched shriek that was even loud on the other side of the concourse. Maybe we need a National Alarm Alarmedness Week.

The train, as it heads north out of New York, provides a spectacular view of Manhattan. It parallels the Triboro Bridge and crosses Randalls Island. I see the fields where I used to play softball and the place where we’d huddle under the bridge if it was raining. The island also has a mental hospital on it, and something called Icahn Stadium, named after the corporate raider, Carl Icahn, presumably by himself. But I see nothing resembling a stadium. Just a football field with lights and metal bleachers.

There’s no internet on the train, but if you leave the network sniffer on, you see networks appear and disappear as you pass through neighborhoods.

I’m reading an article about a famous avant-garde stage piece called Einstein on the Beach, by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, which I saw back in 1984. It’s an extraordinary piece of business, over 5 hours long without an intermission, and things happen so slowly and repetitively that even if you take a ten minute break at any point, you’re unlikely to miss anything. There’s no story and no consistent musical theme, just a bunch of tableaux. The one I remember best is The Train, where a woman stands on a platform on the back of a train and a man stands off to the side. It’s possible that they are singing to each other. What they’re singing is a series of tightly timed and subtly changing numerical phrases. To get the flavor of it, try singing the numbers 1 to 3 to yourself, very quickly an rhythmically and then after about five minutes, adding 4 for about 3 minutes, then just 1 and 2. Occasionally change from 3/4 to 6/8 time. All the while the train is moving very very very slowly toward the back of the stage. At least you think it is, but it’s so slow you can’t be sure. This goes on for about 20 minutes and then stops for no apparent reason. It also has dance pieces that are equally long and repetitive. The dancers do get to go offstage for a minute here and there. I remember one piece where they were doing some kind of circular pattern, then one of the dancers disappeared and returned 5 minutes later with a ace bandage wrapped around her knee, then disappeared again, not to return.

I’m writing this as I travel, but I can’t post it mid-trip. I’m now on my way home. I just need to mention a little bit of rental car haggling that took place when I got to Stamford. I only needed to go a short way to the hospital, but the taxis in Stamford…Not so bad during the winter, but during the summer my seminal taxi experience was walking up to the lead cab and the guy is in the driver’s seat, shoes off, clipping his toenails into the street. All of the cabbies there are Haitian, and while there may be many fine people in Haiti, those who emigrated to Stamford, CT are not. Plus it’s hellishly expensive. So it costs basically the same to rent a car.

So I go into Avis having reserved a subcompact, and the guy asks me if I want to upgrade to a midsize for only $6 extra. I say no thanks, I’m only going a few miles. He says, how about a small SUV? I say, I’ll take a bigger car but I’m not paying any extra. He says okay, I’ve got a subcompact for you. He fills in the contract and gives me a key and says it’s a G6 in space 9 and I know instantly that he’s been trying to scam me. The G6 is a midsize. They don’t have any subcompacts there, and he’s just trying to squeeze the extra 6 bucks out of me. When I return the car it’s a different guy and I tell him what happened and he just smiled and said yeah, we’re supposed to do that.

The Stamford Transportation Center, as it’s called, is a train station. They seem to think that because there’s a bus stop across the street on one side and a parking lot on the other side and I-95 next to it that it’s some sort of multimodal hub, but it’s just a monstrously ugly train station, sitting over the tracks on some concrete pillars. I’ve taken the train from Stamford to Philadelphia more than 50 times. When you get there, the board always says it’s on time and it never, repeat, never is. Three minutes late is the best I’ve seen, but more normally it’s between 10 and 30. This is comforting if you’re late, but annoying if you’re not.

These have been two completely uneventful train rides, easy and timely. Very unusual, I must say. My mom is doing pretty well, but they still don't know what caused this episode.