THE POWER OF NOW

At 9:10 a.m. I enter the F-train from my usual spot: the no-man’s land between the two stairs going up to the main level of Roosevelt Station in Jackson Heights.

Inside, a roomful of open seats becomes the setting for a game of musical chairs—and the music has just stopped.

When everyone’s finished jockeying for a seat, I find one in the corner at the bottom of the “L.” My bags between my legs, my pad out and my pen jotting. Two seats are still free in my third of the car. Nothing unusual, except three commuters happen to remain standing.

I know why nobody has taken one of the seats. It’s next to a man who is asleep and seated in the pair of seats at the front of the car, next to the door. He also has placed a shopping bag and two suitcases on the seat next to him against the wall. Wearing a black baseball cap, he’s maybe in his forties and using his fist to keep from nodding forward. His belongings aren’t moving, and nobody’s asking him to move them.

The other seat is across from me, the center seat of three. A middle-aged woman is to one side, reading Oprah-champion Eckhart Tollet, and an older guy is to the other with a book of his own on his lap. The female bookend seems approachable, sit-down-next-to-able. In black slacks and a white shirt—a hard glasses case bulging through the pocket—the male bookend reads a small-print volume with glasses that he squints through and he underlines passages with a blue pen. He’s also holding a Dunkin Donuts coffee cup, regular size. I bet there’s three sugars in it. When he takes a break from reading, he turns the cup around, examining the circumference.

The train passes two stops. Nobody takes the empty seat. I don’t get it. There’s nothing on the seat. And the people on either side are not so big that there’s only a smidgen of seat available.

Finally, a man enters in navy slacks, wingtip shoes, white shirt and red tie. This passenger looks Indian, probably in his fifties, and carries a big, black briefcase. He looks at the two people flanking the seat. They look up at him. Eckhart Tollet gets placed on the woman’s lap.

“Excuse me,” says the man in the red tie says, as he turns around and sits. The man with glasses has just enough time to shift out of his way before Red Tie’s butt grazes him. The woman reading Tollet pivots to move over—but her hips are already against the partition. She has nowhere to go.

Red Tie chooses the elbows-forward position, ceding the back of the seat to his neighbors, who, with a joint sigh, rest their elbows back and down. Red Tie hunches forward some. The train pulls out of the station; we all readjust our positions. Eckhart Tollet rises from the woman’s lap. She shifts a little left and right, acquiring a bit of space with the movement. The blue pen resumes underlining.

The excitement over, I close my notebook, lean back and shut my eyes. I’ll rest them for a moment—before 23rd Street arrives, and I depart.

—Joe Lunievicz

Armpit Grip 

A woman’s head was under my armpit.

It fit, I’ll give you that.  On a crowded train you do what you have to do. I’d been caught Tuesday morning in the crush to get on the F train at Roosevelt. Man, was it crowded. I couldn’t stop at my usual door spot. I was swept forward by the wave of humanity behind me. I went with the flow, sometimes a good thing to do when tempers are flaring because trains are delayed.  

So I found myself in the center of the car, equidistant to each pole and the doors, and the rail to all four corners. What to do? I had a few seconds before the doors closed and in that time I had to make a decision that would impact significantly on the comfort of my twenty-minute subway ride. I knew I didn’t want to try to use the ceiling grip (tented fingers on the ceiling used as an upside down anchor to stop you from landing on a nearby passenger when the train either started or stopped). The ceiling grip never worked for more than a stop; it was too difficult to keep in place for multiple-stop journeys.

So I looked at my pole options. With all hand-grips equidistant, I needed another criteria for selection. A quick scan showed me there was space high on a center pole to my right. I’m not that tall, but I’m tall for my neighborhood so I reached over heads and took a high grip – sometimes called the armpit grip – before the train lurched forward.  

I looked at the woman under my arm, thinking that if I smiled at her at least the awkwardness of the situation might be alleviated. She was a short Asian woman, probably in her sixties, wearing black and red, with a pocketbook clutched tightly under her left arm. She stared forward with the patented cross-cultural subway passenger’s blank stare.

A woman next to her, I realized, was talking to her – or perhaps I should say talking at her. She was also Asian, dressed in black and red and had a similar bag under her arm. Her whole arm encircled the pole I had chosen. She spoke Chinese in a barking tone, thrusting her chin at the woman under my arm.

I recoiled a moment, thinking my armpit was in danger. But then I relaxed a little, as her one-sided conversation continued without fisticuffs emerging.

I surreptitiously glanced down at the woman beneath my arm. Her impassive face never moved while her partner spoke. No raised eyebrow. No involuntary twitch. No nod or shake of the head. No eye contact. Nothing. The woman, who I now assumed was either a relative or a good friend – at least in my mind that’s who she was – continued talking and pinching her face together as if saying, “Can you believe the things that I have to go through?” 

They got off at 34th Street Penn Station, and my armpit, no longer exposed, breathed a sigh of relief. At 23rd Street we were still crowded and the wave of commuters swept me out the doors.

I pulled myself to shore, out of the throng of humanity, and waited for the turnstiles to clear. Then, adjusting my bag on my back, I exited with some sense of dignity.  

Sometimes you go with the flow and sometimes you wait for your chance to swim alone.

–Joe Lunievicz