First off, a big thanks to Straphanger Joe for stepping in to keep the site fresh in my absence.

The family vacay was great–sun, beach, and an endless supply of buffet food and cerveza in the Dominican Republic. All we needed was a decent flight home Saturday to close the happy loop.

Indeed, New York was downright besieged by nasty weather. Despite the Male Stewardess on Delta assuring me that a little wind in New York wouldn’t slow us down–the CNN on our tiny airplane TV said winds were about 68 mph at JFK–the plane banged a left as soon as we crossed the U.S. coast, and headed for a surprise stop in Atlanta instead of JFK.

Atlanta Hartsfield is legendary for its busy-ness; add untold thousands of pissed off New Yorkers, sunburned and perhaps even still sand in the crotch, rerouted from the likes of the DR, Puerto Rico, Orlando, etc., and it was just mayhem–no one knowing where to go or what to do, people cutting lines to nowhere, a jammed airport suddenly swollen like the banks of the Bronx River. The worst of human nature at its best.

Two little ones in tow, we saw no hope in crashing in the airport, and quickly booked a room at a nearby Hilton for what certainly seemed like a reasonable rate, at least by New York standards. Thank God for the Blackberry.

We checked in around 10:30 p.m. and, after getting Little Miss C and Little G to bed, I huddled over the Blackberry again from our bathroom. Calls to Delta’s main line got the immediate busy signal, but calls to the Sky Miles club (like I’m really a member) actually were met with a human. I got a nice lady named Bobbie who repeatedly attemped to get us on a flight the next day, but as soon as something became available, it was quickly grabbed.

“It’s like…moving pictures,” she said, not quite the apt metaphor but I got the picture.

She eventually got us on two flights: the Missus and Little Miss C on an 8 a.m., and me and Little G on an 8:15er.

It was close to midnight. We’d lost an hour coming from the Dominican, and were about to lose another due to daylight savings. We shut out the night’s misery and slept.

And woke up five hours later to get the kids together and get to the airport.

It was pitch black and cold behind the Hilton in Atlanta. The queue for the freakin’ airport shuttle was 50 deep, despite a pair of short buses making the run.

Our clothes better suited for the Dominican than ATL’s surprising chill, we lost about 10 minutes waiting for an available bus—an amount of time that would bite us on the ass later.

The airport was pretty much the same madhouse as the night before; massive lines for everything. We finally checked luggage and the Missus and Little Miss C bolted for their 8 a.m. flight, us boys a bit behind.

Security was downright slammed; the girls breezed through, though, as Little Miss C was in a stroller. They made their plane.

Me and Little G, however, stuck in security, missed it by five minutes.

And so our 12 hour ordeal at Hartsfield began, as we rode the monorail to various stops (A, B, E) and attempted to go standby on various flights (9:50, noon, etc.). The standby boarding passes piled up in my pocket like spent OTB slips.

The system is more crooked than a New York governor. We were #s 17 and 18 for the 9:50 flight, then #63 and 64 for the nooner. If you think you’re prioritized because you’re traveling with a hungry, underslept 4 year old, you’re sorely mistaken.

The standby crowd gradually got to know one another as we schlepped from gate to gate like migrant workers. We got to talking with Tom from Ardsley, a 40-something who was traveling with two senior citizen females, perhaps one of them being his mother, and one of them in a wheelchair.

In between playing dinosaurs with Little G (Little Foot goes to a scary place called Meat-Eater-Ville and has a close call with a hungry T Rex called Sharptooth, played over and over and over with minor variations), we kept calling the Sky Miles hotline on the Blackberry, and were told the earliest possible flight to New York was Tuesday morning—a full 48 hours away.

Just as we’d looked into flights to Baltimore, Phila and Washington, Tom From Ardsley had tried Cincy, Detroit, anywhere that would get him and his ladies out of Atlanta and toward New York.

We realized there are two approaches to getting nasty with an airline employee. You can get just simply downright nasty with no real strategy for getting results, as we’d seen the mook dumbass in the Yankee shirt do the night before as he rammed his SmartCart (the only smart part of his operation) past a line of stranded stragglers to show an airline employee he was angry about the disorganization and lack of communication. (In fact I sat across from the aisle from that mook dumbass on the flight to the DR; when the 8:30 a.m. departure hadn’t happened by 8:35, he yelled, “It’s 8:35, c’mon, let’s go-oohhh!!”

The other approach is what Tom From Ardsley did—yell and scream but do it in a way that nudges the employee into producing some sort of gainful result.

After failing to successfully cajole an employee at the Blackberry store near our gate to let us have a courtesy charge, we bought a new charger–35 bucks, if you’re scoring at home. After a brief charge, we got on the horn again, and scored our first break in 24 hours: a flight the next morning.

Suddenly our mood lifted; I began seeing Atlanta in a positive light. Get a hotel room downtown, see the sights with Little G, drink the native Coca Cola, see where Andre 3000 grew up, be up in the air inside of 24 hours. It sounded eminently doable.

Meanwhile, Tom From Ardsley was working a Delta employee pretty hard, and got results: a flight to Newark that afternoon. Tom told me he’d told the man that me and Little G needed to get out that day too, and that we should talk to the Delta guy.

I weighed my options: the flight the next morning was OK by me, but leaving that day would be unthinkably good. I approached him, hoisting Little G up to eye level so the Delta guy could see the sadness and tiredness in the whelp’s mug.

The Delta guy was Michael Hagans, a handsome black man with a gigantic, winning smile. I told him my new pal Tom From Ardsley said he had some magic powers to get people home. Hagans smiled that megasmile and began typing.

He typed for several minutes. On cue, Little G whined about how miserable he was.

“It’s OK, Little G, I know you’re exhausted,” I said, pinching his bottom to maximize the look of despair on his face. “This man is going to do his best to help us get home.”

I may have muttered something about the kid’s emergency medication back in New York, I’m not sure.

Hagans asked if we’d go to Newark. Sure, the gals went to JFK, but they’d probably be home long before use anyway. Absolutely, I told him.

Typing. More typing. More freakin’ typing. Magic fingers coming up with the winning keyboard combination.

“OK,” said Hagans. “You’re all set. Two seats flying to Newark at 5:30 today.”

I shook Hagans’ hand, though I would’ve preferred to kiss him. Little G gave him an emphatic high five. I hugged Little G.

“Keep taking care of your family,” Hagans told me, words I may not forget for a long time.

We were over the moon. We celebrated by riding an escalator to a Heineken-branded restaurant, which was set apart from the rest of the dreaded airport. We got lunch and set about working on Little G’s airplane Lego model we’d bought at the gift shop. Buying it was alternately brilliant and foolish; it would occupy a bored, cranky four year old for hours, but it also required intense concentration to put together, and that was in short supply after the previous 12 hours’ events. Plus, I’m just not that hot at models and other spatial-relations-related exercises.

The food came, a chicken cordon bleu sandwich, a grilled cheese, some chips, Sprites. The house music played some country broad – Shania, Trisha, I dunno – covering, fittingly, Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home.” “I’m on my way, I’m on my way,” she twanged. “Home…sweeeeet…home.”

And, five hours and endless dinosaur role playing later, we were. I must’ve stared at my boarding pass a dozen times, making sure it was real, treating it like the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Our seats were in the rear of the plane, but that didn’t stop us from pushing to the front as soon as they started boarding the rich people and using the face of an exhausted four year old to our advantage. They let us on, and we locked into our seats like we’d never give them up—whether or not Delta found the nine people it needed to opt for the $600 voucher and night in Detroit to solve its little overbooking problem.

Soon as the wheels went up, Little G fell asleep. I looked down at him, curled up so tiny in his seat, and it just hit me, my mind a jumble of SmartCarts and droning Delta announcements and Monorail rides and Little G scared by the unnecessarily loud auto-flush toilets. I dropped a tear the size of a whiskey shot on my sleeping son.

PAST PLANEJOTTINGS INVOLVING DELTA HERE

How could I forget, one of the main highlights from our Metro-North excursion to the city Sunday. We were heading home and had just arrived in Valhalla. “Get ready,” I told Little G. “The next stop is ours.”

The conductor then announced that the next stop wasn’t in fact, Hawthorne, but Mount Pleasant. The Mount Pleasant stop is that teeny tiny little platform near where Stevens hits the Taconic; it’s for those taking the train up to visit the dearly departed, such as Babe Ruth, in Gate of Heaven cemetery.

The Bambino rests eternally in Hawthorne.

The train eased into Mount Pleasant, but to say it was a “stop” flatters it a bit. The conductor said the last car was the only one that would open. No one got off and no one got on. We may have stopped for three seconds.

Nonetheless, it was my first stop ever at Mount Pleasant after almost 3 1/2 years on the rails–though I did come close three years ago. This actually qualifies for “exciting” for me these days.

[image: findagrave.com]

Since I don’t spend nearly enough time riding the rails to New York City, we packed up the gang to head in for a day trip yesterday. Little G is obsessed of late with two colossal things: skyscrapers and dinosaurs. So we threw it to him: see the dinos at the Museum of Natural History, or see the skyscrapers in midtown.

He opted for the buildings, which meant we could take the train.

We bundled up the kids, packed the snacks, and I got a taste of what the rest of my commuting brethren enjoy each day: driving to the station and parking in the lot. It being a weekend and all, we had our choice of spots, so I took the one usually occupied by the Yankeemobile during the week, hoping to impose some sort of jinx on the spot.

The 9:53 was about five minutes late (what, you couldn’t be late when I was chugging into Hawthorne station on my bike today with seconds to spare, having read Little G one too many pages from one of his dino books this morning?), and it was pretty packed. The Missus had suggested seats near the front, to minimize walking along the Grand Central platform, so we set out for seats.

I saw what looked for all the world like an empty three-seater, but upon arriving at it saw a SnoozerLoserThree-Seat-User–a young woman napping across all three. (For the record, SnoozerLoserThree-Seat-User is just a working title…we’ll try to come up with a snappier term for those seat-sleeping types. If you can think of a good Word of the Week for this, please send it along.)

[The Missus snapped this shot moments before the woman woke up.]

We instead grabbed a pair of folding seats facing each other, but Little G–his first train ride since the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City in December–started howling because there’s no window next to the folding seats (handicapped people apparently don’t enjoy looking out windows, I s’pose). He and I relocated to a two-seater with a window behind the SnoozerLoserThree-Seat-User, and he was happy again.

North White Plains saw a cattycorner two-seater open up, so the Missus and Little Miss C slid in there.

And we were off.

It’s interesting to see what affect the SnoozerLoserThree-Seat-Users (SLTSUs) have on the train. At White Plains, we saw at least four different parties do just as I did: See what looked like an available seat (or three!), approach it, then look with dismay at the body lying supine across it. We get it, you’re tired, you’re hung over. But it’s not a victimless crime. Buy three tickets and I promise I won’t blog about you.

The SLTSU eventually woke up around Bronkers and then, to ensure she had all three the rest of the ride, spread her backpack and a second back across all the seats. No longer snoozing, she was merely a LoserThree-Seat-User.

Much like Little G’s beloved view out the window from the train, making the trip with newbies is a good reminder that there’s interesting stuff to be seen amidst the boredom of the daily commute. Little G’s favorite among the New York skyscrapers is the Chrysler Building, and we were all of a block south of Grand Central when we looked back and saw it in all its silvery majesty–a vantage point I’d hardly noticed in three years of walking that route. (Cue the Annie soundtrack: You’ll stay up, until this place shines….like the top of the Chrysler Building!)

We meandered down to 34th and Park and decided not to tell Little G about what skyscraping colossus awaited around the corner. It took seconds before his eyes went wide and he said “Look!!!” Indeed, the Empire State Building (the informal “Empire”, to Little G, who’s on a first-name basis with all the Gotham skyscrapers–the Empire, the Chrysler, the Flatiron) loomed like Kimbo Slice in the foreground.

Staring skyward as we were, we were pestered by the usual swarm of hawkers looking to sell us a trip to the top. We turned them down, but did stop at a gift shop to get post cards. Little G wasn’t having the 10 for a buck cards, opting instead of the 99-cents apiece ones: One of the Empire, one of the Chrysler, one of the World Trade Center, RIP, and one of the Brooklyn Bridge.

After a cold but fun frolic in the Madison Square Park playground and a pit stop at my work, we headed back for the train. We grabbed some sandwiches at Mendy’s (”You said lunch, Jerry. Soup is not a meal.”) and hit Grand Central with time to spare. I made a big show in front of Little G to drop a quarter into the cup of a homeless man huddled in the foyer of Grand Central (the hypocrisy…like I ever do that on a normal commuting day). Sensing a teachable moment, I paraphrased the man’s placard for Little G once we were out of earshot, telling him that the man did not have a job and did not have any money.

Little G found the positive in that way kids do: “If he doesn’t have a job, then he can play with his kids all day?”

I stammered through a response that said he could, but the toys would not be very good.

We hit the 12:48 with a few minutes to spare, grabbed a six-seater, busted open our Mendy’s bounty, and looked forward to one final view from the bridge.

Aerialist extraordinaire Philippe Petit is well-represented in TJ’s house. Petit of course tight-roped across the Twin Towers for 40-odd minutes in 1974, an insuperable act of bravado that absolutely blew our wee minds at the time (we may have even burned a hole through the page of the Guinness Book of World Records with Petit on it after staring at it so much), and was the focus of the brilliant Man on Wire film from 2008, which I believe made its TV debut on Sundance Channel last night.

With Little G’s recent obsession with skyscrapers–the Burj, the Empire State, the Chrysler–we picked up the children’s book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers for him for his birthday last month. It’s got gorgeous illustrations of the city and the Towers (I mean, look at that pic below), and handles the elephant in the room–Sept. 11, of course–with abundant grace.

Finally, we’ve been reading Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, which looks at New York City on that muggy day in 1974 through the eyes of several New Yorkers, including a prostitute, an Irish monk in the Bronx, a rich lady grieving the loss of her son in Vietnam, and a teen who subway surfs and snaps photos of graffitti in the tunnels. The common thread, if you will, between the characters is Petit’s highwire act in lower Manhattan that day.

Curiously, Petit is not mentioned by name.

McCann is no newcomer to the novelling world. A creative writing professor at Hunter College, he won the 2009 National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin.

The guy can spin prose. Of the Metropolitan Hospital you see while cruising up/down the FDR, he writes:

A row of smokers stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety-Eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital.

Here’s a peek at a support group of women who’ve lost their sons in Vietnam. Claire is a rich Park Avenue lady. The rest of the members are blue-collar broads.

“Marcia” sees Petit on the highwire as she rides the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan that summer day.

–It’s a guy, says Marcia, on a tightrope. I mean, I didn’t know it right away, I didn’t figure it out just like that, but what it is, there’s a guy on a tightrope.

–Where?

–Shh, shh, says Janet.

–Up there. Between the towers. A million miles up. We could just about see him.

–What’s he doing?

–Tightroping!

–A funambulist.

–What?

–Oh, my God.

–Does he fall?

–Shh.

–Oh, don’t tell me he falls.

–Shh!

–Please don’t tell me he falls.

–Shh, already, says Janet to Jacqueline.

–So I tapped the shoulder of this young guy beside me. One of those ponytailed ones. And he’s like, What, lady? Like he’s real annoyed that I disturbed his little standing sleep or dream or whatever it is he’s doing at the front of the boat. And I said, Look. And he said, What?

–Mercy.

–And I pointed it out, the little flyman, and then he said a bad word, you’ll excuse me, Claire, in your house, I’m sorry, but he said, Fuck.

And Claire wants to say: Well, I’d say fuck too, if I were me. I’d say it backward and forward and around the block, fuck this and fuck that and fuck it all once, twice, three times. But all she does is smile at Marcia and give her what she hopes is a nod that understands that it’s absolutely no problem to say fuck, on Park Avenue, on a Wednesday, at a coffee morning, in fact it’s probably the best thing to say, given the circumstances, maybe they should all say it in unison, make a singsong out of it.

–And then, says Marcia, everyone around us started looking up and before I knew it even the captain of the ferry was out and he had binoculars with him and he said, That guy’s on a tightrope.

–For real?

–Now you can only imagine. The whole deck, full of people. Their early commute. Shoulder to shoulder. And someone’s walking a tightrope. Between those buildings. the World Towery thingymajigs.

–Trade.

–Center.  

[Previous TRAINJOTTING READERS, including A Fraction of the Whole and The Deportees, can be found here.]

Miserable morning in the northeastern U.S., including a hard, steady sideways rain. Let’s call it the Umbrella Buckler.

Biking to the train was way out of the question, and even walking there seemed less and less viable.

I asked The Missus about perhaps hopping a ride when Little G was heading off to school up in Priusville. That would mean them leaving earlier than normal so I could catch the 8:43; it also meant helping get both Little G and Little Miss C dressed, shod and ready to rock by about 8:35.

I stood in the shower and hoped the walk to the train would not be a repeat performance of standing in the shower. I was leaning toward the ride-with-the-kiddies option, but when I got downstairs, Little G’s school pants I’d picked out were dirty, Little Miss C had fouled yet another diaper (on top of the, what, six she desecrated yesterday. We’re tapping her damn piggy bank for the next batch.), and the place was in a typical state of disarray. I had 13 minutes to make the 8:43, so I bid good bye to the clan and set out on foot.

It was awful out there, and I hadn’t gone 30 feet before my umbrella caved and my feet were wet. But to be honest, it wasn’t as bad as the Great 2009 SuperSoaker from December 9. The rain wasn’t coming down as hard, and it was actually warm this morning.

Still, a miserable day to walk, with only the middle of the street free from giant puddles. I jogged to Amsterdam and crossed Bradhurst.

I ventured down the hill, that sleepy neighborhood where that one house still has the McCain-Palin sign up, and spied a white Cadillac easing out of the driveway a bit ahead.

The driver put it into Drive, went 20 feet and stopped.

As I approached the driver rolled down the window. Could it be?

“Can I give you a ride somewhere?” asked the woman.

Score.

“Sure,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

As I opened the door, the woman said, half kidding, “You’re not dangerous, are you?”

“No,” I said as I slid into the passenger seat. “Are you?”

“Well, not really,” she joked.

We made small talk. She said it was an awful day to try to walk. I explained how I could’ve waited to go with my son, but I would’ve missed my train. The kid thing…immediately and insuperable evidence that I was not, in fact, dangerous. We discussed mine (wee little folks) and then hers (college age). She told me to enjoy them while they’re young–just as the nice elderly man with the two young dogs does every time I pass him with one of my kids on a walk. (Random trivia about that man: his name is Joe Girardi, and he says he’s a distant cousin of that Joe Girardi.)

I promised the woman I would.

I mentioned that I usually bike; she said her husband had bought a bike and wanted to get out more, but found the Mount Pleasant area completely unsuitable for biking. I suggested the old rail trail running parallel to 9A and the Saw Mill; park in the lot near the Pleasantville exit off 9A, and ride from there.

She said she’d mention it to him, and suggested that the info was a fair trade for driving my ass to the train. She didn’t actually say “ass.”

We got to the back entrance to the station on Broadway. I thanked her again, and hoofed it up the stairs.

Three times now, I’ve been driven to the train by strangers: a woman from Ireland, a man from Russia, a woman from Yonkers.

Humankind is doing OK, if you ask me.

Mother Nature, she’s still a bitch.

I had plans for a few pints in the city with Big Jim, in from Ireland, and the reports of a blizzard weren’t about to keep me home. I got Little G to bed on the early side and set out on foot for the 7:53 train Saturday night with the bare essentials: the day’s Times, a flashlight, the old iPod Nano (easy to slip into a pocket when hitting the bars), and a Beck’s for the ride.

The snow had just started picking up momentum and was starting to stick. It blew hard on my face and instantly adhered to my pea coat.

Along the sidewalk on Elwood, I encountered another man braving the rough mid-Westchester night. I see him around our tiny downtown and the train station a lot; I believe he’s mentally impaired and he enjoys smoking butts with the cabbies.

“Good evening Sir!” he said cheerily, extending a gloved hand.

I returned the good evening and hand.

“Be safe!” he warned. “I hear we’re in for rough weather.”

I felt the rough weather pelt me in the face. We wished each other well and went our respective ways.

I saw bodies spill out of the soon to open Punta Cana Spanish-Portuguese restaurant on Elwood, the biggest addition to the tiny main drag since the liquor store opened earlier this year. I figured it was construction workers, but as I got closer, saw that the restaurant was actually open for business. It’s a wee place: three or four tables and a counter. But they had a few customers on this snowy night.

The 7:53 was right on time, and chugged through the arctic blast with ease. I was warm and safe in Central Bar, Sierra Nevada in hand, in 55 minutes.

Big Jim was late, as usual. I told him up front my plans to be on the 12:06 so I’d have a fighting chance to keep up with Little G and Little Miss C Sunday. He looked out the window, the snow blowing sideways, the drifts piling up, people entering the bar looking like snowmen.

“I don’t think you’re getting home tonight,” he said.

A few at Central Bar and a few more around the corner at Black and White, and two or three more “You’re never getting home tonight”s from Big Jim.

Midnight was beckoning. I said good bye and was lucky enough to score a cab at 10th and 4th in the East Village. The cabbie had been off-duty but saw a white mark that he figured was going in the direction of his home in Queens. En route to Grand Central, he peppered me with questions about Westchester, Long Island, good colleges, etc. He was Bangladeshi. I gave him an extra buck for being personable.

I harbored faint concern about what Big Jim had said about the trains; was I to be stuck in Grand Central all night? I stocked up on supplies at Hudson News: water, a Daily News, a giant Fast Break candy bar, and jumped on the 12:06.

She started out on time and seemed to have no issue with the snow whatsoever. Indeed, the 12:06 pulled into Hawthorne around 12:47–a minute earlier than scheduled. I was going to text Big Jim to tell him how woefully wrong he was, but was too lazy to do it.

The snow was blowing around like mad. I pulled my hat low over my eyes, cued up my flashlight, and headed for home.

It could’ve been much, much worse. Look at these tales of woe from today’s NY Times:

Helena E. Williams, the president of the Long Island Rail Road, reported that about 50 riders were stranded, shuttled and towed aboard four trains in a seven-hour ordeal that began at Pennsylvania Station at 1:17 a.m. and ended at Ronkonkoma at 8:45 a.m. In between there were snowdrifts, ice, an engine breakdown and no heat on a three-hour stretch going backward from Wyandanch to Farmingdale.

And in New Jersey, passengers aboard a train and a bus, both operated by NJ Transit, had a close call at Pennsauken on Saturday night. Officials said a bus with 26 passengers stalled on snow-covered railroad tracks as the train with 38 passengers approached. The bus riders were evacuated moments before the vehicle was struck by the train.

“There was a terrific impact noise,” said Ralph Mintel, a passenger on the train, “and the rail car rocked violently from side to side. I feared that we had derailed, and that the car was going to tip over.” He was relieved to learn that no one was killed and only two people aboard the train were injured.

A Hampton jitney left New York City at 9:30 p.m. Saturday with fewer than a dozen passengers and got to Southampton at 6:30 a.m. Sunday, a nine-hour adventure in the storm.
 

It was, quite simply, my worst schlep to Hawthorne Station after over three years in this racket.

The morning’s weather was a peculiar hodgepodge of what the cheery weather folk call “wintry mix” and what can only be described as “Satan’s potpourri”–a driving freezing rain blown sideways by torrential winds, giant puddles of slush from the night’s wet snow, and rivers of fresh precip gushing down both edges of the street.

As I set wet foot on Pythian, I prayed a friendly neighbor or even a stranger–hey, it’s happened twice–would take pity on my soggy ass and drive me to the train.

When I turned right onto Broad, the wind hit me with full force. It was a wind that seemed to pick up momentum, like a runaway snowball, as it blew off the Atlantic, strafed Nova Scotia, rolled down the eastern cliff of Hawthorne and made its way up the giant hill on the west. It hit me like a nine-iron to the face from Tiger’s cuckolded missus, and buckled my umbrella into a useless heap of wayward metal fingers.

I forged on, attempting to hop the giant river sweeping down Bradhurst, and catching my trailing right foot in the foreboding drink.

I encountered a pair of folks in a pair of cars a few houses down; he’d backed out of the driveway to make room for his wife to pull out. I’d met the couple one day in the fair months when walking Little G home from “Firetruck Playground”. They’d just moved in with their young children. I welcomed them to the neighborhood and told them about the good playgrounds.

I peered through the frozen rain, hoping a little eye contact would merit a ride to the train. Alas, both ignored the crazy wet guy with the broken umbrella lurching by.

I thought about turning back, regrouping, changing my clothes, and working out a new gameplan. But the weather showed no sign of subsiding and I figured I’d just be wasting the five blocks I’d conquered thus far.

On I trekked. Every so often, a stiff wind would deliver a fresh round of soakage, icily pinning my overmatched cheenos to my legs, finding every centimeter of unguarded clothing between my coat buttons.

I had a brief break from the onslaught while heading north to Chelsea for a block, but got the same old F- you from Mother Nature as I again turned to the east. At this point of the trek there are sidewalks, but no one had thought to plow the damn things, which were covered in three inches of gray muck. The Mount Pleasant plow guys saw fit to plow our roads something like three times in the wee hours Saturday night, long after the snow had stopped and been completely cleared. I looked out our bedroom window at one point late Saturday, and saw the truck make two consecutive trips up and down our tiny dead end street, the plow on the road waking all within a quarter mile, and there hadn’t been a single flake on the street for a few hours. Kaching!

Where were the guys shoveling the sidewalks?

Not only were the sidewalks unwalkable, but there was a four-foot wide stream rolling down both sides of the street, so the only logical place you could walk was toward the middle of the road.

At this point, both thumbs were numb from taking turns holding the nearly useless umbrella up in the air. I thought at one point about actually hitchhiking the rest of the way to the train–what is this, 1989 in Narragansett?–but could not get my numb thumbs into the proper hitch position.

Soaked to the bone, I truly did not think my journey could get worse, until that god-awful “Bad Day” song started running through my head. I’d seen that hapless tunesmith Daniel Powter on the Yahoo homepage a few days before, awarded the dubious One Hit Wonder title for the decade. Now his mawkish tune was bouncing around in my brain.

I stepped into the station lot quagmire 15 minutes after I set out, clinging to one shred of hope: snagging a beloved folding 1 3/4 seater on the train, with a tiny heater inches away, and no seatmate to inevitably say something like, “wow, you got wet today.”

At 8:16, I caught the first break of the day, and hopefully not the last: An available 1 3/4 seater, with a steaming cup of cocoa, a pair of warm slippers, and a tiny fireplace. I may have imagined the cocoa, the slippers, and the fireplace, but the rest of it was real.

It’s that time of year again, when children’s attention turns to seasonal favorites like A Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty, and The Grinch; in fact, How the Grinch Stole Christmas is on ABC tonight at 8.

I found myself reading The Grinch to Little G the other day, and, as I have in years past, took serious issue with the ending. If you’ll recall, the Grinch has stolen every last bit of Christmas goodness from the people of Whoville-even the roast beast! He then has a change of heart–in fact, literally…his heart gets like three sizes bigger before your eyes–and guides his sleigh back to Whoville to return the gifts, the trees, the ornaments.

The good people of Whoville greet the Grinch with open arms. They even invite the guy to their Christmas dinner!

I say, nonsense! What sort of people would greet the villain who stole every last decoration and gift from their very homes with open arms?

The Grinch of course comes from the brilliant brain of Dr. Seuss. With all due respect to the good doctor, I humbly submit a more realistic ending to the book.

The Grinch schlepped his sleigh down the hill

And in minutes was in the middle of Whoville

His ride was piled high with trees, wreaths and gifts

He was eager to patch up some 1,000 rifts

But the Whoville folks had another notion

They swarmed on the Grinch in rapid motion

They pummeled him with legs, elbows and fists

They beat on his being till they could not bend their wrists

Then they laid the Grinch flat on the ground

And ran the sleigh over him with a sickening sound

The Grinch was a mess of blood, bone and guts

He got what he deserved, the demented old putz

The Who-ers grabbed the gifts from the sleigh

And did their best to salvage Christmas Day

They erected their trees and put presents under

Never again would the Grinch attempt such plunder

They scooped up the fallen Grinch from the street

And carved up what looked like the usable meat

They grilled him to get him back for his acts that were vicious

Cindy Lu Who took a taste and exclaimed, “This Grinch is delicious!”

Happy holidays, everybody!

Little G had a “Train Safety” special at pre school recently, with a visit from a pair who conduct train safety classes for a living.

His “All Aboard the Shape Train” cut-and-paste masterpiece came last week.

I enjoy glancing at the learning agenda put forth by my son’s pre-school up the road in Priusville; it’s fun imagining him in the school learning about the various topics (animals, firehouses, pumpkins), and it’s nice to know what we are getting for our considerable tuition outlay.

I was struck to see that today’s lesson involves “Train Safety.” Little G, who’s in a 3’s program, learned about airplanes on Tuesday, and made a few pretty cool ones that fly a bit better than the lame paper ones I fold up for him. It looks like it’s Transportation Week over at PCC.

I’m curious to hear what train safety is all about. Is it about minding the gap as you enter a train, or staying glued to one’s seat once you’re on board? Or is it more about co-existing in a part of the country where trains racing by is part of life–stop well in advance of the safety arm when trains cross, or avoid those pesky third rails altogether?

I simply don’t know, but I expect a full report from Little G tonight. If he tells me his teacher said to cap my evening commute consumption to two Sam Adams or one Foster’s oil can, I can’t say I’ll be pleased.