I'm Not Sure What Normal Is

In New York, I am as far from the commuter rail as I am to the airport in Beijing.  In twenty minutes, I can make my way to either location.  Thirty minutes would be safer, but it never works that way. In Beijing I am in an Uber or a cab.  (Uber has just thrown in the towel and invested in DiDi while I was on the road.  Will Uber still work when I get back?)  I’ll drive if I’m going to pick someone up.  In New York, heading from New Paltz to the Poughkeepsie train station, you’d never think of doing anything but driving yourself.

There is a long stretch of single lane road that always has me wishing it were China.  If it were, I would blow past the other people recklessly and save at least three minutes from my ride.  If I try that in Ulster County I might get a ticket and I might get shot.  I behave myself.  And nearly everyone else does too which allows you to go faster than you would ever feel safe doing in China, where someone is always poised to cut out unexpectedly, opportunistically.

Today I’m dropped off at the station. “Thanks. Bye.”  I’ve got time to buy a ticket properly from the man behind the 1940’s counter, sample what they have at the station store, which isn’t very much.  I didn’t have lunch.  Should I get a Snickers bar?  I don’t really want a Snickers bar.   I shuffled over here to buy something but there’s nothing I want.  It will be a big dinner. 

Down to the stairs and on to the seat I always get, the riverside view right where the long window begins.  It isn’t but it may as well be the same seat I sat in on the very same train doing this run as an eighteen year-old thirty-two years go.  Etiquette on trains is different from etiquette on the highways.  Before we’ve left Poughkeepsie the young man in front of me has struck up a conversation on cell phone with someone.  “I TOLD you.  Are you gonna be there or what?  WHAT?  Look, just BE there.  Yeah.” 

From the sound of things he’s meeting someone in Beacon, which is only nineteen-minutes away now, as we sail out of Poughkeepsie.  In Japan he’d have been asked to keep quiet by now.  In China he’d be just one more loudmouth without the least concern for who else hears what. Here, on Metro North, I’m not sure what normal is.   Now that he has soured the atmosphere I feel uninhibited about starting my own phone call.  Who cares?