June 12, 2022 – Niles, MI
MTA
All posts tagged MTA
Lately, I’ve been noticing people with canes. I understand how useful they can be if you have injured your foot, your leg, for instance. Use a cane while it heals.
But the canes I have been watching are being used by older people. Typically, they are not pretty or decorated. They look worn and they bow sometimes from supporting the weight of their owner. At every other step, there is something to hang onto, to lean on, to use to keep your balance.
I wonder what the first day is like with a cane.
At my bus stop, there is a wonderful woman who waits for buses with me nearly every morning. We’re both older than most of our compatriots on the bus and like many older people, we worry about tomorrow a lot more than we let on. She and I grouse about the bus drivers and we keep tabs on other regular riders.
Something she said to me once has bothered me since it first came up months ago. We were talking about walking home from the office in a power outage. We agreed it would be an effort to cover this distance on foot and she told me suddenly, “You know, I’d hate to have to start using a cane. I want to hold out to the last minute.”
We both walk now unaided and many days, I will go out of my way to find nice walks because walking clears my head. In fact, I know that I could walk the entire route to my office more often if I had the organizational skills necessary to get out of the house a half hour to forty-five minutes earlier. She, on the other hand, might not be as comfortable, even though she clearly does not need a cane. Today.
But how do you know it’s time?
Is there something that cries out to you that today is the day you surrender to old age and start using a cane? Does a doctor tell you to use one? Or is this something that creeps up where you just don’t remember later how it started, how you found yourself in the store, picking out a cane?
I can’t imagine they would be any harder to get used to than my new hiking poles. I took them out for a spin and had the rhythm down pat in just a few steps. If the height is right and the feel of the handle doesn’t irritate your hand, how difficult would it be to use a cane? It’d be pretty simple, right? Step, cane-step; step, cane-step; step, cane-step. And off you go.
But then, there’s no going back, is there?
Now you are officially a senior citizen, an older American, a what, disabled person? With that one stroke, you would go from being able to disabled, and unlike the ones who use canes
when they have sustained an injury, you will know, deep down, there’s no going back to normal. You don’t get to improve or get better. This is the moment you would have to realize you can only get less better. Today, cane; tomorrow, walker? Then, wheelchair? And those beautiful shiny black hiking poles that were so exciting the first time out, will be left in the closet for someone else to use. Someone younger.
I am not ready to give up hiking just yet. I want to walk unaided and I relish every single chance I get to do so. Of course, I worry this walk today or maybe one tomorrow could be the one where I realize I just can’t do it anymore. It’s too hard or I worry too much that I could fall.
But, I hope it’s not this walk. It’s almost sunset now and the breeze is amazing. I feel it on my face and when I step out, it nudges me forward. I stretch up to my full height at each street corner and I step carefully across all those cracks in the sidewalk. I catch a glimpse of kids on the swings, the men playing dominos at the card tables alongside the vegetable market, and the young girls comparing notes on that boy across the street.
I don’t want to miss any of this – this wonderful and exuberant life of the city – and it’s fabulous that nobody even notices me as I walk by.
As I walk by.
God, I love those words.
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https://www.createspace.com/6198995
All I need in the morning, I think,
I think all that I need in the morning is to know my pants fit.
You can’t complain really if your pants fit.
Then, I guess I‘d like water – cold to make coffee,
Hot to shower.
Can I get a raisin scone too?
That’s not too much, is it?
I like scones.
Lots.
And you know, if my pants fit, I should be good.
But maybe a croissant a la plancha
Like they make in that place in Barcelona?
I remember that time in the hotel,
The waiter explaining how to say that awkward
French word
In Spanish,
Spelling it out slowly to unsuspecting
American tourists.
“Coruosan.”
And you know, if my pants fit, I should be good.
But maybe if the sky had some fluffy clouds?
Is that too much to ask?
And a breeze to sweep my hair off my face a bit?
I don’t need cloud-less, I need cloud more
So I can take some pictures
And share them with my kids
To watch them roll their eyes
And say, “So?”
And you know, if my pants fit, I should be good.
But maybe a seat on the train?
I like to get a seat by the time my train gets to 149.
Otherwise, I have zip chance in Hades
Of getting one at 125.
On the night train home, I just stand by
The fancy people who never go all the way uptown by me.
I bet their pants fit.
I bet they don’t even think about it, being fancy and all.
And you know, if my pants fit, I should be good.
Because I have pants, and I have water
And I can buy my scones on the corner,
Just out the back door.
Clouds and breezes are great
But not really needed,
Not every day at least.
I can even sleep better knowing
In the morning, my pants will fit.
After all, they are my pants
After all, mostly there’s hot water,
After all, if I just run the tap, there’s cold too,
After all, what makes me happiest is just this little thing:
Pants or no pants,
Even when I order croissants
In Spain,
I am no longer an unsuspecting
American tourist.
Available in MY BOOKSTORE – top menu bar!
Also at Q.E.D. Astoria (both books),
the New York Transit Museum (A Marshmallow on the Bus),
and Word Up Community Book Shop (A Marshmallow on the Bus).
You can also read my work on Wattpad and The Broad Side.
Most subway stations in New York have a similar palette. White tiles, grey cement floors, the yellow edge of the platform, and all those shiny silver trains. Many stations have mosaics dating from the first few years of the 20th century and some have nice new ones – dating from the 1990s, like the 81st Street Station on the B and C lines or the 66th Street Lincoln Center station on the 1 line. But this station, the Rockefeller Center station where the B, D, F, and M lines stop, has something wonderful that not only adds to the color palette but gives a glimpse of the station’s past where you might least expect it.
This staircase, unlike so many staircases in the New York subway system, is made of wood. It has been painted over and over again in what I think is about four different colors, the last of which is a high gloss black. But underneath, as the paint wears away, there is a rust color, a vibrant yellow, and a flat uninteresting tan. And each color is visible as the color on top of it wears off.
This metal stair rail runs alongside the wooden one and this time of year, it will chill you to use it. I’d like to say the wood one warms to the touch but it doesn’t and in both cases, you will find your hands colder at the bottom of the stairs here than they were at the top, assuming you use the stair rails like I do.
Someone took the time to carve a few letters here, a name there, and at the bottom of this staircase, where the paint is completely gone and only the varnished wood remains, you’ll see the name “Ken.”
But I love the palette; that multicolored, Jackson Pollock, paint splash of colors from what is probably 80 years’ worth of paint. It covers the wear inflicted on that railing every day by tens of thousands of cold hands in the winter, sweaty hands in the summer. We have worn our way down to the rust-colored paint here, down to the yellow paint there, to the tan over there, and finally, to the original varnish. The last person who varnished that staircase could have been the artist who installed it when the station opened, coinciding with the construction of Rockefeller Center in 1930.
There’s a metal railing that runs next to it – probably just to meet some City code. It would surprise me if this wooden stair rail were removed any time soon though, because it is just as solid as the new metal railing. It could use a fresh coat of paint – which I normally would applaud. But not here. When the painters come in to cover this railing again, probably with a coat of that high gloss black, I will miss the colors and the small view into Rock Center’s past.
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