I love going to work in the mornings. Let me clarify. I love the effort it takes to go anywhere in New York especially the path I take from my home in Bushwick to the suffocating streets of midtown. West side, that is.
I get up early to give myself enough time to drink my coffee, not slurp it down like a shot of tequila or a bottle of water after hot yoga (a skill honed in our on-the-go society). Yet in the mornings I like to drink it slowly so I can look out my window and watch my neighborhood wake up: kindergartners bundled up like stuffed pillows waddling after their mothers. People pacing impatiently at the corner waiting for the bus, their frosty breath following them as they move from side to side. I can get an idea of how cold it is by the way people wait for the bus and how fast they walk down the sidewalk. There is one man who sits waiting for the B43 cocooned up in a large puffy jacket, his eyes barely peeking through. When I see him, I know it must be fluctuating around 20 degrees. Or less. If people walk in pairs and are chatty with each other, rather then stiffly iced in their coats, I know I don’t need my hat and earmuffs.
I take the L train to work. Some hate it, for its sluggishness between 8 and 9 am on weekdays and for the painful 30 minute wait on weekends anytime after midnight. But on those week mornings, I don’t mind it. I like that it goes slow. Although I’m showered, warmed up with oatmeal in my stomach and have my bag around my shoulder, I’m not ready to be in work mode just yet. I savor the anonymity in the morning. In the stuffed subway car full of strangers I feel most relaxed and myself. I can choose to look at my fellow riders, or I can choose to be totally detached, and catch up on my reading. When I’m in a curious mood, which is most of the time, I like to watch the people on the train – what they are wearing, what they are reading, who they are talking to and how. I wonder where they are going, what they are thinking by the looks on their faces and what they did the night before by the way their eyes droop. I imagine. I wonder. To me, humans are the most interesting of species. And I cannot get enough of them.
By the time I get off the subway I feel awakened by my new curious thoughts or sometimes humorous incidents that frequently happen on the train. The other day I happened to be standing next to a teenage girl that was not having a good morning. She was sitting and the crowded train forced me to invade her personal space. You get used to that after awhile but she couldn’t tolerate it that day. She eyed me the whole ride with the unblinking stare of death. I tried to move away but stepped on her foot. I felt like I had just pulled a pin out of a grenade and it was about to explode. Fortunately I got off in the nick of time.
I get off at the Penn Station stop in midtown. It always smells of toast and breakfast aromas. It smells strongly of warm muffins on the C and E train side and more coffee and eggs off the A train. The smells make me want to get in my pajamas and sit around a kitchen table, like I used to do on Saturdays when I lived at home. Once I get outside, the midtown rush hits me and I put on a rough techno mix to get me going with the pace. I feel like I’m in a movie, living in New York, and I switch my music on to fit each scene. Mornings in midtown needs something that sings drama and mayhem, while a stroll around Rockefeller Center on a winter night is asking for John Coltrane.
Midtown is ugly but exciting, and the diversity is stimulating for my curious mind. You have middle class business people that buzz by puffing anxiously on their cigarettes, tourists that crowd the sidewalk path outside of the New Yorker hotel discussing their daily itinerary, Spanish workers that wait outside Dunkin Donuts and delis hoping to get work, hefty mail men striding by with large crates of morning mail, out-of-town dancers looking lost and late for practice and construction men perched on pickup trucks blowing on their $1.00 black coffees.
By the time I get in the door to the building I work in I feel awake and alive. What I see in an hour is enough stimulation and sights to fill a day. But in this city, everything is all packaged down to a New York minute.
