Pi

I found myself on the Upper East Side this morning waiting for the 6 train, Lexington Avenue line, the Green line, at the 86th Street Station. Some things I noticed about the folks commuting from there as compared to my usual base in Jackson Heights.

* There were lots of people wearing wool coats, nice ones. The men wore a lot of navy and there was little dandruff. One guy wore a black and white herringbone. I think he was at the wrong stop. The women wore tan, red, gray, and blue.

* There were a lot of white folks.

* I thought I was crazy taking my Espresso 77 hot tea on the subway but up there on 86th Street it seemed pretty common. There were six people with coffee/tea/hot beverages in hand. One, obviously a veteran, had his own non-spill cup from Starbucks.

* There were a lot of iPods with white ear-buds. One woman was using an iPod touch – I could tell by the way her fingers swept across its surface.

* A young man had his book wrapped in the Daily News, its cover hidden. I recognized it as a Mortgages For Dummies book. His cover was blown. There were five other books out in commuters’ hands – one of which was a hardcover ­– and only one other paper in sight. The paper looked like The Book Review from the Sunday Times.

* There was one person wearing a NY Giants Champions hat, and it was a woman.

Overall people were pretty nice. I smiled at a woman and she smiled back. People made room and there was very little pushing or shoving even though it was pretty crowded.

A man and a woman, tourists probably, searched through a map of New York City and spoke to each other in French.

There was an advertisement from NYC Teacher’s Fellows lining the wall from one side of the subway to the other. They were all white letters on black background – very stark. One slogan that caught my eye read, “Teach them that Pi can be a piece of cake.” (Of course, they used the symbol for Pi, which gets lost when posting on the blog.)

So I wondered about this for a while. Are they saying that working with Pi can be easy or are they saying that Pi can be a piece of cake? It can’t be a piece of cake, of course – because it’s a Pi. Even if it was a pie rather than a Pi it still can’t be a cake because it’s a pie. Perhaps I was being too literal this morning.

By the time I got to 42nd Street the racial make-up of the car had changed. By the time I got to 23rd Street most of the car had emptied out. I came up to ground level and it was raining. I had forgotten my umbrella but being able to walk through Madison Square Park made the light rain bearable.

Passing the Comfort Diner, famous for its apple pie, I smiled.

Going home I’d be taking the F and all would be right with the world.

–Joe Lunievicz