Personal Yummy #93
It’s a Sunday night, around 11:30, and I’m on the 4 train, on my way home from Brooklyn, where I had a nice dinner and lots of wine at my friend Sally’s St. James Place brownstone apartment.
I am sitting and relaxing, thinking about all of the interesting topics that we discussed, when a middle-aged man gets on the train at Union Square and approaches me.
“Miss,” he says, bending forward in my direction and looking at me intently, “may I sit down beside you?”
He looks haggard and dirty, so I am a bit apprehensive, but his unassuming and pleasant manner overrides my caution.
“Sure,” I answer.
But then my attention is stolen by a man and a woman who sit down directly across from me. I’m not certain, but I think I’ve seen this woman on the train before.
The man is rather good-looking, with a stocky build and wavy blond hair, and he is nestled very close to the woman—who is heavyset and disheveled—and is chatting incessantly in her ear, and very softly, so I can’t make out what he is saying. The woman is talking back at him, almost talking over him, in fact, and I can’t hear what she is saying either, but she has a distinctive voice, remarkably high and whiny, much like a little girl’s.
As they talk, the woman rummages through an oversize blue tarp bag that she has adjacent to her and that is linked over her shoulder, and which seems to be full of countless items. And she takes each item out, one by one, and examines it and lays it down by her feet and all around her—a roll of toilet paper, a jar of Goya spices, a deck of cards, a can of tuna—creating a chaotic spectacle.
The two of them continue this seamless stream-of-consciousness jabbering for quite some time, until 51st Street (the 4 train is making local stops tonight), whereupon the man abruptly stands up and darts out of the train, in what seems like mid-sentence.
Speaking of darting, the woman’s eyes are now moving all over the place—from one end of the train to the other, rapidly scanning everything—reflecting the speed of her words and conversation a moment ago.
She eventually grabs some kind of a granola bar out of her bag and lazily starts eating it, and, when she’s finished with that task, starts studying a bunch of credit cards she dug out of her pocket.
My eyes have been locked on her the entire time, but she’s not even aware that I am there. As for me, I had forgotten all about the man who had asked to sit next to me, until now.
I glance sideways at him, and he is obsessively counting a bunch of change he has in his hand, amid his overly long fingernails with tons of dirt under them. And—what is going on here?—he, too, snatches a bunch of credit cards out of his pocket and proceeds to ruthlessly examine and count them, over and over again, as if he has lost something.
At this point, I am feeling utterly strange, with all of this abundance, synchronicity, and scrutiny in such close proximity to me.
After having had such a nice evening with my friend, I’m not sure why I’m experiencing this twilight-zone ride (could it be because a lot of our conversation had been about financial issues?), but either the universe is trying to tell me that I should be more careful and exacting with my possessions and my money, or (could it be quite the opposite?) that I should follow the path of least resistance, allowing the bounty and beauty to flow.
You know me.
I choose the latter.
Like in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, you have to know where to train your focus.
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