Riding It Home Every Night

Heading up the New Haven line.  I’ll do it again tomorrow.  I don’t think I’ve seen this view in a long time.  I was thinking of a trip up to White Plaines from maybe eight years ago, heading to the Westchester County Airport, but that’s the Harlem Line.  My father would have made this run into the city every day for a decade.  We lived in Harrison for the first ten years of my life.  As the story goes that was the furthest commute he’d consider, though he’d later live in a place where the commute was twice as long. 

We’ll pass through Harrison in a few minutes.  It all looks like pretty dense suburbia out there.  If memory serves, we should pass New Rochelle, Larchmont and then Mamaroneck before we roll through the hood of my earliest memories.  All the trees are denuded.  But they are strong, deciduous trees.  They rise up high and defend their piece of the sky, despite the winter grey.   

Got to see some live jazz last night.  The Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi, was at the Village Vanguard.  I didn’t recognize the name but it didn’t matter.  I trust the venue’s curation of jazz talent. And indeed, it was grand.  I couldn’t catch the rest of the band member’s names, through the basement acoustics and his thick Italian accent, but the horn section was majestic.  Song after song I just let the trumpet sax or trombone sax heads fill me with light, fill me with confidence. Older and older I appreciate the remarkable fragility of a small venue like the Vanguard.  The late-great Village Gate, where I once worked briefly as a waiter, is now a CVS pharmacy.  My friend is here in the New York for the first time.  There are a million things to see, but this is what I will show you.

Looking out at all the faces of New York commuters.  Some of these guys must be heading home early for the long weekend.   Back here in the USA they have the MLK holiday on Monday.  I wonder about a life where I found some niche doing something here in New York, taking the train in every day, and then riding it home each night.  These are all the people who I played on the playground with, matured now into bankers and lawyers and deliverymen.  Who among them has figured out a life that’s suites them?  Do they wish they’d gotten up and out of this corner of the world?  I’d like to find a way back.

Writing away, lost in thought, we passed unceremoniously through my hold hometown.  We just sailed through Rye and up into Port Chester and up into Connecticut’s handle down into New York.   The man with the tie and the man who’d taken off his sport jacket will all be getting off at Stanford.