The Way Home

Dirty streaks on my window.
  April 15, 2006

The other day, as my train pulled out of a station in the Martian-looking industrial part of Queens, I spied a dark shape on the tracks. It was stirring in the April wind. For a moment, just one brief moment, I thought it was a turtle and my heart skipped a beat.

Several days earlier, a train car where I lucked into a seat stank of stale urine. The women who entered it held their noses; the men wanted to hold their noses but didn't, stoically. By the time we got to my stop in Long Island, nobody noticed the smell.

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