Flip It Over, Spat It Out

I have a lot of bags.  I’m the last man out.  My little girl has left a map and bath bombs.  My older daughter has left a book or two, two pairs of pants, one shirt.  And my beloved wife has left a bag’s worth of home products.  As always, I descend to my mother’s basement to cull through for a bag to “borrow.”  Now I’ve a shoulder bag with forty pounds of books.

We arrive at the Poughkeepsie Station with about eight minutes to spare.  Slowly the elevator arrives, the door swing open clumsily and it lumbers up to the main floor of the station. I toggle in my mind between cash and card and after punching the screen with my index finger a number of times I’m given the choice and choose cash.  The first bill I put in is spit back out.  I adjust Andrew Jackson’s face and try again.  Spat out.  Flip it over.  Spat it out. Another twenty dollar bill. Rejection.  All I can do is cancel.  And I begin again, eating up time, punching through to the point where I can now swipe my card and enter my pin.  

Now we’re in the elevator down and I check the time.  I still have a few minutes and here’s the train before me.  The doors in the first and the second and the third are all closed.  A lone man is standing outside a front car.  But now I notice people inside.  My bag is enormous.   It barely fits as I push it down the aisle.  There is no possible way that this will go to the overhead.  Rather I rest it on two of the seats of a three-seat aisle and hope the train doesn’t fill up.  It’s seven o’clock at night, heading against the commute so I doubt it.  A lanky girl with dreads has pulled her knees up and closed her eyes.  Perhaps I should do the same.

The Hudson Line seems to always pull in at one of these westernmost, upper level tracks.  The other day coming in on the Harlem Line I had to walk up a flight of stairs or two to reach the main hall. I’m one of the last people off the train wheeling my enormous black case with the shoulder bag full of books on top and a backpack of books on my shoulders.  I roll up slowly into the station.  Starbucks is still open at 9:30PM.  There is a female cop out front.  Now the long ramp up to Forty Second St.  I assume they’ll be a cab queue up here and there is. 

Now a young guy with dreads is asking me which bridge we want to take.  “Prefer to go under the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.”  We turn and turn again and race along the side street that leads to the entrance to rise up to the FDR Drive.