After Rosemary's visit, I took a quick field trip to New York on the Shore East Line from Old Saybrook to New Haven, then on the Metro North from New Haven to Grand Central Station. Trains are a smorgasbord for people-watchers like me--eavesdropping on families, businessmen, and high school kids dressed for the prom. I also love reading on trains, and today read all of Linda Gregg's "Chosen by the Lion" and Mary Karr's "Viper Rum," along with her essay "Against Decoration" on the long journey into the city. My destination was a poetry reading at the Brooklyn Historical Society in honor of the publication of "Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn," an anthology edited by my friend Julia Kasdorf and fellow poet Michael Tyrell. Unfortunately, my memory slipped, and I ended up all the way down at the Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway, instead of the Historical Society. So by the time I'd taken the subway up to Brooklyn Heights, I'd missed the reading. However, I didn't miss Julia, and I had a pleasant evening out with her and Michael and a few friends, listening to funny stories about the readings and celebrating the great labor of love--sometimes unrequited--that anthology-making is.
Train sketches:
Full-grown clean-shaven young men in shirtsleeves, ties stowed in their pockets, enter the train in the unexpected May heat, talking amongst themselves about high school friends, football, ice hockey minor leagues they one played in, colleges they and their friends attended, young warriors set to the task of making money, so that in 30 years they can still pay the Visa bill of someone like the sleeping blond across the aisle, dark glasses over her eyes.
A slender 40-ish woman with dyed red hair and a short black and white print skirt stands propped against a pillar on the platform, reading "Eat, Pray, Love," her slim, tanned knees winking althernately at me as she tightens and relaxes her quadricep muscles, a habit well-hidden by longer skirts through the years and now revealed, perhaps unconsciously, by fashion.
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