I’ve parked my bike in a different spot the last few days. In a nod to the daily forecast for thunderstorms, I’ve eschewed the bike rack I fought so hard for to park under the staircase overpass. I’ve also noticed there’s only one bike there chained to the overpass fence; there used to be four or so bikes, which was what initially prompted me to pester Town Hall for the bike rack.

Anyway, while parking in the new spot, I’ve noticed a white painted crosswalk spanning from the crummy old station house across the station byway, to the greenery bordering Elwood Ave. on the other side. I even saw a pylon informing motorists to let pedestrians pass under state law.

I’m fairly certain I’ve never seen this before. If so, kudos to Mount Pleasant for showing bipedals the love. Whether motorists will or not is to be determined.

By the way, dedicated Trainjotting readers (Hi Mom!) may have noticed that I’ve stopped referring to Hawthorne as “Hummerville” and Pleasantville as “Priusville.” This is due primarily to one thing: We had our home appraised for refi purposes, and the appraisor was a man from Pleasantville who parked his big honkin’ Hummer in front of our house.

Moreover, I no longer see the 2-3 Hummers that once dotted–OK, dominated–my immediate neighborhood, surely victims of those escalating gas prices last summer. I’ve even seen a few Priuses around little Hawthorne.

“Priusville” worked as a stand-in for Pleasantville because Pleasantville is crunchy and artsy–a little slice of Boulder/Burlington along the Saw Mill. That, and we see a red Prius every time me and Little G visit his beloved Dump Truck Playground.

“Hummerville” was always intended not so much as a characterization of Hawthorne residents’ love of ridiculous former military vehicles, but a general label for the suburbs–where the car is king, and pedestrians (and cyclists) took an, um, back seat to automobiles.

But that’s all changed now that we have a pedestrian crosswalk.

I ventured into the city Saturday night for a concert, fooling Little G into thinking it was an hour earlier (much harder these days, with daylight savings time and all), and headed out the door for the 7:53.

Downtown Hummerville was quieter than quiet. I’d forgotten the parts of the Times I’d meant to bring on the train, and picked up my pace so I’d have a minute to duck into Pop’s Deli and grab one.

Alas, Pop’s was out of the dailies.

“Saturday’s a big reading day in Hawthorne,” the cheery proprietor told me.

They had a pair of Irish papers, the Echo and the Voice, which seemed sort of fitting to read before going to see the Pogues. I picked the Voice, which had Jimmy Fallon on the cover. The guy was about to ring me up when he spied a Times, separated into its various sections, behind the counter. He pieced it together, folded the Sports back into its original order, and dealt me the rag for a buck fifty. I put Fallon back on the rack on my way out.

A minute before train time, I didn’t see a soul–not one soul–on the platform, which of course got me thinking there was no 7:53, which would pretty much ruin my whole evening’s plans–or force me to salvage them with an expensive cab to White Plains. But a moment later she came chugging from behind Gordo’s, lights blazing in the dark night. A few bodies emerged onto the platform from the foul-weather greenhouse.

In the rare event that I’m schlepping to the city for a Saturday night, I tend to grab a semi-private 1 3/4-seater. The amateurs on the trains on the weekend tend to think these seats are off-limits (seasoned commuters know much, much better), and the Saturday evening train is louder than the Union Square platform with both a 4 and and 6 pulling in at the same time.

Alas, the two 1 3/4-seaters I tried were locked in the upright position. I found a seat amongst the boozy proletariat and cracked open the Sam Adams I’d brought from home. As I’d expected, it spilled a bit, shaken up from the walk. I lamented spilling beer on my sleeve, then remembered I was going to a Pogues show and would be covered in spilled booze halfway through “Streams of Whiskey.”

The beloved 1 3/4-seaters were again locked up when I hit the 12:06 heading for home. I had a trio of guys in their early 20s near me, loud and sort of drunk and kind of funny. The guy facing me a few rows away looked like he’d perhaps been at the Pogues show at Roseland too–Irish tweed cap pulled low over an Irish-American mug, Doc Martens, tattoos all over his neck (both in the shape of names in cursive and a pair of hands merged in prayer) and tats on both sets of knuckles spelling HOPE and LOVE–not unlike the cover of the Pogues album that shows PEACE and LOVE on a boxer’s knuckles.

There was another trio of young guys a few rows past them in a five-seater. Those guys were drunk as well and two of them were engaged in a slap fight, which prompted the punks near me to start mocking them. The punks had surmised that the slappers were preppy college kids and started lobbing the likes of “Dave Matthews Band!” and “Lacrosse!” and other preppy trappings their way, trying to egg them on. The preps, meanwhile, kept slapping each other.

I got up to use the bathroom and got a look at the rest of the punks. They weren’t the slightest bit thuggish, which surprised me that they were needling some other guys toward fisticuffs. I shut off my iPod and listened to their conversation. Turns out they were in a band, and were making up funny and melodic rhymes for the various station stops on the schedule.

Still, they kept egging on the preps, who’d ceased their slap fight around Fordham. The slappers didn’t take the bait. All taunting and slapping would stop momentarily when a young woman would happen down the aisle to use the bathroom, and both parties would try every single trick they knew to get the woman to stop and chat. At the risk of sounding like a schoolmarm, I can’t get over what the young chickies were wearing, both on the train in and the train home. Where were these slags when I was 21?

The rest of the ride was mostly uneventful. The punks eventually tired of taunting the preps, who became pre-occupied with a young woman in a dress cut mid-thigh who actually stopped to talk to them.

Around Valhalla, an intense smell of pot wafted through the train. Everyone in the car’s heads swiveled about in search of the smoking gun, so to speak, but no culprit was forthcoming.

Finally, the kid in the tweed cap said, “That’s not pot. That’s a real skunk.”

Mercifully, the 12:06 ambled into Hummerville moments later.

It’s a little before 6 p.m. Friday, and a train full of commuters trudge up the stairs at Hummerville station, weary from the recently wrapped work week.

A generic White Male shuffles down the stairs toward the platform, completely indiscreet except for a bright orange Syracuse sweatshirt.

Three steps behind him is a woman of about 45, lumpen and oafish and similarly generic. She too wears the bright orange Syracuse sweatshirt, en route to the city to watch the Orangemen do battle against West Virginia.

She’s giddy about the pending game, her peppy temperament a far cry from the commuters who were simply happy to mark another week of having a job amidst the Great Recession. Perhaps she had a few Bud Lights over at Gordo’s before showing up at the station.

She eyes the commuters and locks in one the guy in front of me, who’s wearing a vaguely orange baseball cap, like one you’d get at some beach club in Newport.

“GO ’CUSE!!!” she yells to the bunch of us, hoping for a “Whoo hoo,” a ”Yeeeahhh, boy!” a “That’s what I’m talking about!” Heck, she’d even settle for a mumbled “Boo-Ya.”

Alas, none of the above are forthcoming. She’s the lady at the rock concert, yelling “Cat Scratch Fever” in the moment of dead time, getting blank stares from everyone around her.

“I guess not,” she mumbles.

“Wrong crowd,” says her guy pal.

Their spirits properly muffled, they make their way to the downbound platform.  

[image tracygreen.blogspot.com]

OK, so it wasn’t a 2 1/2 hour ride this morning, as I’d feared.

We’d caught a little lull in the nor’easter, so I pulled my tweed cap down low over my eyes and set out on foot for the 8:16.

Just as I approached Hummerville station, along the back entrance that’s slightly depressing, I heard an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” it said, “the express train to Grand Central is running five minutes late.”

I slowed down and checked out some of the newspapers in the big black octo-box next to the stairs, and saw a man chugging it across the street. I gave him the international “slow down” sign–hands out, palms down, hands slowly moving up and down. “Five minutes late,” I said.

“It’s right there!” he yelled, as if a rabid diplodocus was bearing down on us.

Indeed, a train was shimmying into the station. It was an ancient thing, older even than those crappy trains on the New Haven Line. I think it was some express that was supposed to be much earlier, but was late enough to be close to the 8:16. Regardless, I jumped on.

The train was half full. The seats were made of pleather and the lighting awful. There was open air near the doors, with mounds of snow piling up on the floor there. If you closed your eyes you could’ve been commuting in 1982, psyched as all hell about your new personal cassette player that’s the size of a cigar box, buttoning the vest of your three-piece suit against the encroaching cold.

It was no beauty, but the old train did some pretty fair time to the city, skipping North White, and was only half full to boot. Foot of snow be damned, we got in two minutes early.

As we noted earlier this week, Bel Paese–Hummerville’s lone red sauce joint in its tiny downtown district–has shut its doors for good.

Yet Bel Paese seems to be putting up a fight. With fierce winds battering the area the last few days, the giant For Rent sign that hung from Bel Paese’s facade has fallen down. All that remained was a smaller sign saying “Call John Williams,” as if Williams was some gigolo, or had some nifty Star Wars theme music to sell you.

Its tattered American and Italian flags whipping in the winds, Bel Paese seemed to say, I’m not going down with a fight, John Williams be damned–just you try to pry this farfalle and fusilli out of my cold dead hands.

Stay tuned.

My newspaper deliverer “Dolores L.”

It’s not the first time I’ve written to you, Dolores L.

As I’ve asked more than a handful of times in the past year, where was my New York Times this morning? Sure, it had snowed and rained yesterday, and it was a bit icy this morning. So what. We had a package on the doorstep this morning–a stork didn’t deliver it, Dolores L.–and surely we’ll have some mail in the box later today. (Unless, of course, Congress decides to grand the U.S. Postal Service its five-day workweek and gives the guys and gals in pale blue today off.)

We commuters are creatures of habit, Dolores L., and if we don’t have our papers to read in the morning, it screws our routine up big-time.

I didn’t have time to buy a Times at the Station Deli, Dolores L., so I grabbed a freebie AM NY from the red box at Hummerville Station. I was concerned that the skimpy paper would not successfully sate me throughout a 48-minute ride, so I grabbed two copies of AM NY. (I know that doesn’t make sense. That’s what happens when commuters have their routines messed up.) There are major world events happening these days, Dolores L., and I’m afraid I’m in the dark about them this morning. Thanks to you.

I keep thinking of that Christmas card you left for us last month, Dolores L., your name (”Dolores L.”) and address clearly spelled out so we’d kick you a Christmas tenner. Well, I was going to do that, Dolores L., but, ya know, it was icy, and cold, and, well, I just never got around to delivering it.

You know how it is.

Dissatisfyingly,

Trainjotting

The House With the McCain-Palin Sign That I Passed En Route to the Train Today.

You’re a smallish white house on a decent corner lot on the corner of Memorial Drive and Atlantic. You’re essentially non-descript, except for the blue McCain-Palin sign in the middle of your front lawn.

Dude, it’s over. McCain went down in a frothing jangle of desperate cries of “socialism!” and “Joe the Plumber!” almost 11 weeks ago. Despite the valiant efforts of your little sign, shivering in the 10 degree chill as I hustled toward the Hummerville station for the 8:16 this morning, the senator simply won’t be sworn in in front of the frenzied masses next week.

Perhaps you’re thinking, as long as the sign remains in the lawn, the salty old flyboy–and his telegenic deputy who spies on Putin from her veranda–still has a chance. Maybe it’s like the bedroom of a deceased loved one that sits untouched years after said loved one’s departure–to box up the books, the clothes, the photos would be to admit they’re never to return. And so another day passes, and personal effects remain untouched.

But it’s just not happening.

So please, house on Memorial Drive (such a fitting street name!), remove that dated sign from your lawn and retire it to the place where campaign signs of losing candidates go.

I’m sure you’ll be fast friends with Kerry-Edwards.

Tauntingly,

Trainjotting

Miserable morning. Hummerville was laminated in a thin layer of ice, so I left the trusty Trek at home and headed out on foot–a foot hindered by a Metro-North door slamming me in the heel yesterday on the 5:46, no less.

The rain was falling and the roads were a messy mix of ice and mud. I hit the home stretch to the Hummerville station–the lonely strip of auto parts stores, insurance offices and an ancient graveyard–that line the back entrance to the station.

As I neared the stairs, I saw a massive SUV preparing to leave after discharging a passenger. It was a black Escalade that was as big as your first NYC apartment, roomy enough not only to house an NFL quarterback and his O-line, but a few of his fighting pit bulls as well.

I gave the colossal ride a sneer. Mind you, we’re not all fully green–I know The Missus takes our car over to the elementary school to spin donuts the second I steer my bike out the driveway. Bomething about the sight of the Escalade, its driver warm and dry on the inside as I schlepped through the freezing rain, dropped me into a foul mood.

But my mood changed as I got within 10 feet of the hulking Escalade. A license plate from the heavens: EGO 1914.

That made my morning.

Yes, it was cold this morning.

Very freakin’ cold.

Thanks to the black ice, the gray ice, and the old-school silver ice, I left the bike in the garage this morning and set out on foot.

I try to allow myself 15 minutes on a typical walking day, and hoped to give myself a few minutes extra today to negotiate the ice, the frozen drifts generated by snow plows, the (surely) unpaved sidewalks.

Alas, it didn’t happen, and I set out with just about 15 minutes to go before the 8:43 pulled in.

My luck turned just a moment later, as the lady from the house cattycorner to us yelled out to me. She’s a quiet lady and her husband’s a decent guy, if a bit cranky in that old no-nonsense Bronx kind of way. They have a dog that’s not friendly and doesn’t like women. We invited them to Little Miss C’s christening party in the summer and they were perfectly pleasant.

The lady was going to the post office, which is 9-10ths of the way to the train, and asked if I wanted a ride. Manna from heaven, I thought as I made my way up their driveway. [Editor’s Note: Our house looks really cute from that angle, an angle I hadn’t seen before. Especially in the snow.]

She turned the key in her old Cadillac once. No go.

Twice. A pneumatic cough and a sputter.

Thrice. Four seconds of engine hum and then sputter.

Four times. You know where this is going.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Thanks anyway,” I said, lamenting not only the frigid walk to the train but the two minutes I’d just lost in this exchange.

I set out jogging. The running warmed me a bit. Indeed, one stretch of sidewalk that fronts a veterans memorial was cleared of snow; the rest of the time, one was forced to walk in traffic, which was light.

I made the train with a minute to spare. But I was hardly free from the tundra-esque conditions, as a thin layer of snow was on the floor of the train car. No, not the cotton-y fake snow in mall displays this time of year. Actual snow; presumably the door had been left open during the weekend’s blizzard.

If a little snow on your train floor doesn’t get you in the mood for the holidays, you have a heart the size of the Grinch’s.

I was on the 6:33 heading toward Hummerville last night. Our ticket-taker had the typical Metro-North conductor’s Irish-by-way-of-Brooklyn mug. He also had a pronounced limp–the sort of lurching gait associated with some sort of fairly serious ailment. I don’t know exactly what the ailment is–polio, perhaps?–but you see someone walking in this manner–one knee pointing dramatically toward the other–in the city just about every day.

Anyway, I don’t mean to single this guy out for his handicap. But amidst all the stories about LIRR employees cashing in on lucrative, and often completely bogus, disability claims (not that “middle-class moronism” isn’t a legit ailment), here’s a guy whose clearly not functioning at 100%, but is working nonetheless–on his feet the whole shift, lugging those pain-in-the-ass doors open.

I don’t want to beat up on the LIRR either. I don’t doubt the vast majority of its employees show up to work when they’re supposed to, fight through aches and pains, and certainly work on the major holidays–something I’ve thankfully never had to do. Surely many LIRR employees are collecting disability for completely legitimate injuries.

I’ve gotten a fair amount of comments on the LIRR scandal since it broke in September, I’m guessing the majority of them from LIRR employees. It’s worth noting that most of them continue to defend the widespread practice of filing bogus disability claims, even after everyone from the governor to the attorney general to LIRR president Helena Williams said the practice was essentially indefensible, and one DC railroad expert compared the LIRR’s reported disability rate to that of a gulag’s.

In fact, many commenters felt TJ was simply jealous that his employer didn’t offer substantial payouts–and free golf at state-owned courses–for fake injuries.

Wrote Jon Parissi, who presumably likes the CAPS:

LIKE ANY ONE OF YOU WOULDNT TAKE AN EXTRA DAYS PAY FOR A CONTRACT NEGOTIATION VIOLATION. oH NO THANKS BOSS i’LL JUST TAKE THE 1 DAYS PAY SO i CAN BE A NICE GUY. SOUNDS LIKE SOUR GRAPES TO ME. JEALOUSY IS A STRONG EMOTION.

Wrote Harvey:

I guess you make less than Mr. Koerber did [Ed. Note: Edward J. Koerber is a retired engineer pulling in $170,000 a year. Yes, we do make less than Mr. Koerber]. Instead of knocking his work rules, why not get a better job, or put in a resume?

Wrote Jeff Rosenburg:

As the RRB IG (Railroad Board Inspector General) said, “It’s the law.” Applying for what is yours is not fraud, plain and simple.

Maybe you should try to get job there.

Wrote CathyAnne:

All who are complaining are just jealous that THEY don’t have those work rules, or the pay the LIRR workers do.

You get the picture. Unless I’m missing something, it sounds like, say, a bank ATM that was known to give out an extra twenty every time you visited, until the bank got wise and fixed it. After that, the people who used to get the free twentys were furious at the bank for fixing the ATM, and at the citizen who told the bank the ATM was busted.

Maybe I’m missing something.

Either way, I salute the Metro-North guy limping his way along on the 6:33 yesterday.

[photo is wealthy retiree Edward J. Koerber from NY Times]