Cell Phone Alley

 

Why haven’t I noticed them before?

 

I’ve walked down the steps to the 23rd Street station on Sixth Avenue at least one thousand times in the last five years, yet I never noticed them.

 

Now they’re there every day when I descend into the underground, right by the landing where the east and west stairs meet and the sun can still create shadows.

 

They are the Cell Phone Girls. They stand on that well traveled concrete plateau getting their last bit of electronic conversation into their day. They stand there, islands in the stream of humanity that flows past them, both ascending away from and descending down into, the subterranean, where no cell phone service may penetrate, at least for the next few years.

 

I passed three Cell Phone Girls today. They stood with their backs to each other in a triangle, their flip-phones hidden beneath brown and blond hair. I watched from the Metro-card machines. As a train pulled up to the station, they nodded as if they were saying goodbye to the person they were on the phone with then, one after the other, closed their phones and joined the flow toward their ride home. I followed them through the turnstiles and we all went our own way as the F train pulled up.

 

Standing room only, without attachment to the world of electronic communication, we pushed our ways onto train cars, carefully pulled out our papers, books, and magazines and lost ourselves to the underground.