Seat Portrait Style #1: The Blocker

A prim, tightly-wound, humorless matron is seated with iPhone in the aisle seat of a three across, has a banana peel and purse on the (middle) seat beside her. Empty window seat at the end.

No one in Short Hills or Millburn would want to sit beside a woman filing her nails with an emery board or risk banana moisture on their bottom. She's a blocker, opening the field, giving me the seam.

Oh wait, she's less prim, if no less grim. Taking off her suit jacket in East Orange she reveals shoulders, top of torso, she turns younger. Fixing her straps. Getting ready for her day. The public filing in an enclosed space is still entitled and offensive, but there's the free seat between us. She's clasped and closed in her iPhone world. Dour stern unsmiling.

But wonderful , startlingly straight posture. Her suit's long, below the knee. She puts her coat back on to leave. Her collar askew, half up, half down.

No Free Lunch

With the Patch, you get what you pay for. Which is even less than the weekly Independent. In truth, though, all of the local news coverage has either withered, deteriorated or entirely gone away. Shoe leather is no longer expended; instead it's smart phone pictures of adolescents dressed for their prom arriving in antique cars. Six months later and it has yet to be reported the Unitarian Church bought the adjacent Dangler funeral home property and is set to expand.

A diligent reporter would, for starters, subscribe to every church and synagogue's weekly or monthly newsletter. Oh, for Norman Rauscher and the Summit Herald. Now the Bank Street building no longer even bears the Herald name.

Love Poem (1)

Dear dear Nancy Dann
You befriended me, and helped upend a life
Your kindness and grace
Helped save a soul like me
You are like Charles Foster Kane's Rosebud, sprung to life
Young, beautiful, thoughtful, vibrant
  A teacher

Somewhere, your story is out there
And though I may never find it
How did the rest of your life go?
I hope you found happiness
Your smile lit the sky, and the world dissolved
 deserved to find it

The Things You See on the 8:48

Just outside the abandoned Harrison platform, directly across the street, is an old forge made of ancient flushed brick. It's so perfectly melded into the neighborhood you can well imagine the workmen walking to and from their shifts, perhaps getting off the DL&W at Harrison, going home for lunch even, all within a block or two of their job. It's a wonderful 19th and 20th century vignette, tucked into the commute. I looked up C.S. Osborne and found it's still open after 186 years (it was founded before Andrew Jackson took the Presidential oath of office), still family owned by what is now the seventh generation, continues to only sell to the trade and makes dozens of interesting tools for upholsterers and leather workers.

One of life's lessons is, take notes.

http://www.csosborne.com/index.htm

Forever Dredging

I'm forever referencing places that
  are no longer there, and haven't been in
   generations. Sometimes, snatched from history and footprints and readings and
    dead driveways and covered trolley tracks and still present retaining walls, even
     before I walked the mortal coil. But, more usually, they're signposts.
      The parking lot entrance and exit is there, across the street from where the Strand
       used to stand -- the Broadway Diner was the Villa ... Ardie Gulamerian
        and his brother built the two stories on 100 Summit Ave. as a garage
         and installed the first car radio in town there in the 20s, in their 20s...
          that was the Risen's tennis court, that the Unitarian Church school,
           that Leo McGrath's house with the basement party
           The exegesis goes, unceasing, overflooding the levee, at least one month past
            the 90-day expiration date given to me the week of  the move.
             Unfortunately for the missus.

As Archie said to Edith, perhaps best to Stifle. Try to dummy up.

Seeing Back to Front

Leaving east out of Millburn, heading out through the bend to Maplewood, I see the front of the train ahead of the curve -- reminding me of an intercity train. It's a seldom seen view, at least on a suburban run, and puts me in mind of when you could grab the Phoebe Snow out to Chicago from Brick Church and Summit, along the M&E. Sleep in your roomette or -- get really extravagant -- a double bedroom, and dine on linen.

Twenty-three hours of civilized rail, leaving Summit at 10:51am, arriving Chicago Dearborn Street at 8:15am (9:15 Summit time) the next day, in time to get in a full day's business. Or perhaps morning meetings followed by a day game at the Friendly Confines. The dining car on the trip out was open until 10:00 pm, and reopened at 6:00 the next morning.

Unfurling

Just when I wonder if I'll stop seeing new, if the well really won't run dry someday, there's something fresh to see, unremarked, untold before. Look W-SW nearing Orange Station and see the first ridge of the Watchungs unfurl and roll before you. Look, up ahead, up high, over the houses and wires, below the sky, in that intermediate space. Prosaically, promiscuously breathtaking.
 You think, how can that be?
  How is it I haven't seen them before in that way, in that light, from that angle.

Yards and Setbacks

Lighting out east from the station, I look down and out the window right and see the expansive backyards -- uniformly large lots -- of the homes on the west side of Park Avenue. One of them possibly Costanza Iadanza's. One of them certainly Leonard Melni, that one I could point to. There are few, if any, gardens, not yet anyway. It's still only mid-April, just.But no raised beds. I think of all the mowing and trimming and edging, and their wonderful size. Enough to play catch or hurl a fastball. On Caldwell and Clark and Huntley, lots are irregularly sized. I see them with adult eyes yet marvel at how they stretched, yawning, when I was a boy. Unknown, mysterious, worth exploring.

Lighting out from the station east, I stare up and out the left window. The houses on Argyle Court implanted into the hillside like Rushmore, closer to the tracks. Some with balconies or porches to scan the skyline view. Newer than the next developer's lots, on Prospect Hill, set farther back and unseen from the train. But they're there, on more land, bigger lots.Secluded and private, the very essence of the suburb, atop the second Watchung Ridge.

Next comes Friar Tuck, none seen except the outsized new construction foundation that will dominate the scene even more when finished. Was that the Johnson's old house, Mary McVicker's, that came down to make room?

Ship's Manifest

The rear of the train has been the place to be this school-holiday week. The two weeks prior (the last in March and first in April) the train was over crowded, with many standing and all seats taken by Newark or, certainly, Secaucus. But now it's out-of-school week, families are off on holiday and the passenger manifest has dwindled somewhat. You see it and feel it when the 8:48 pulls in from Chatham and Madison and points west. There's more air, and sometimes an entire 3-seat bench is empty in the rear car. This leads me up different stairs -- original Penn Station (1910-1963), with brass railing -- to the Queens-bound E each day, at the 8th Avenue end, instead of the more usual 1-2-3/N-R at the 7th Ave. side.

The 7:24 in Early April

The sky breathtakingly blue and gray and ochrous. You think, closing the sky at Hudson Yards will be a sad thing, shutting off light, shutting off beauty.

Later, in the meadows, just east of Harrison, the coach lights go out. The car is dim, and the wondrousness of the light outside enters exaggerated, pronounced, present. You're heading west to Summit, your home. And I suddenly feel again, this is temporary, I won't always be here. This will look the same -- the sky -- without me. The rear, the background is illuminated. The foreground, dark.

The Surplus and Logic of Capitalism

Harrison station on the Morris-Essex line (closed Sept. 16, 1984, along with Roseville Avenue) really ought to be reopened but, then, so too should the plants, the factories producing goods daily, around the clock. Rather than the stadia and soccer palaces used a handful of days each year. The Port Authority is sinking $173 million into renovating the Path station and 2600 residences are ultimately planned for the 27-acre Harrison Station redevelopment site (along with a hotel and 80,000 square feet of retail).

But nowadays, if you're devoted to economic development, attracting a new stadium is regarded as a lightning strike, a new strip mall of national retailers makes you lucky.

Lost in Thought

Looking east on Springfield Avenue, down Springfield from the Lackawanna trestle, for the first time I saw Briant 's Pond from the train -- a first sight of something I grew up beside, had seen 1000 times or more, a place that had sheltered me and given sanctuary and somehow sanctified me as it gave protection. Woods are so much bigger and more expansive as a child, or perhaps the built world really has encroached farther, pushing the boundaries in.

Today I saw Briant's Pond from a distance -- the Spring Lake, Summit's Spring Lake, as it was once known -- it sparkled and shimmered silver in the clear March morning sun -- bejeweled, and visible probably only due to the lack of leaves. And because of the conductive power, the thinned air, vacuum-like grace of a frosted March dawn. Wondering what harm may come to the daffodils, and the not yet tulips. The apple crop upstate. The budded realm.

All the ascendant women of Short Hills and Millburn are lovely, climbing the platform and stairs, on paths through debris, stepping past ivy glen. Like Bradford Pears outside the East Orange Fire Department training ground.

Higher, Later Now

Tonight's sky was especially golden, honey-soaked, bright with ochre, spotted and framed with flowering trees, Bradford pears even, and the rushing Secaucus water tower. The platform clearance outside my window at Secaucus Transfer is less than six inches.

The bell chimes, the horn whines, and drifts past the Hackensack. Beyond the brownfields, over the plank road, sweeping the tall, dirty reeds. And the sun, higher, later now.

The God of Small Things

Unlike the world of the multiple-unit (MU) cars in the early and mid 1970s, I seldom have the experience any longer of  looking down to the platform -- or up to the coaches. With elevated platforms, windows are at knee height on the single-level Arrows or else at ankle-or-head height on the double deckers.

Either way, I lose the sensation both boarding in Summit or leaving at Penn Station of climbing up or descending down from the carriage.

Not every platform has been raised, of course. I recently boarded in Murray Hill and still enjoyed the ascension, albeit with no descent in Summit. And in Hoboken and Short Hills too.

But the clean sterility and seamlessness of the raised platform, which also allows for mid-car entrances and exits, reminds me of the ordered structure found in Singapore and Tokyo. Many obviously prefer that, but to me it detracts from the railway experience, taking away from the 19th century roots.

Shades of Millet

The light on the 6:54 westbound as it emerges from the Pennsy tunnel in late March is golden, like a Millet, and in a moment I see why the swamplands of the meadows remind me of rural France. There is a disc of setting sun, it could be Key West if there were the Caribbean -- there could be applause and beer and wine and tequila as it sinks below the horizon, just west of Secaucus Junction and the Turnpike, looking out over the expanse of Spring and Summer.

I think of Jean Francois and the Gleaners and the Angelus and heroic peasants and I don't have to force myself to see, I only have to imagine and wander.

4:50 Express

"After Newark Broad Street, this train will express to Summit"

Perhaps NJ Transit engineers are formulating a new breast milk delivery system.

This is a common NJ Transit usage. A train won't go express, or travel express, become an express or make express stops. Instead, it "will express" to Dover or wherever the "final" destination. If the train was actually saying something, somehow expressing its inner identity as a transportation vehicle of the early 21st century, I might not mind so much. Perhaps train number 6643 should express itself to Summit. What might it say?

Neighborhood Found, Neighborhood Lost

It is a happy thing, a joyous thing, and a sad thing, an unfair thing. For me to walk five minutes to drop off my oldest at Brayton, the neighborhood school, to deposit him in second grade, and to look forward to his next three years, not to mention my youngest's five full years (1-5) of enrollment. The four crossing guards I know -- Diana and Claudia in one direction and Ariel and Mike in the other.

But walking east along Myrtle, headed toward the intersection with Mountain Avenue, I can't help but think of the walk farther east, past Morris and Overlook, to my old neighborhood, where there is no more local school, and the walk to Jefferson is probably so long and arduous that few children undertake it, and are driven instead. As Summit shrank its primary schools  to five from seven, think of the companionship missed, the encounter with the neighborhood not made -- the connection obscured -- while seated behind tempered glass.

It is a class travail, and always has been. Except that once, a school came with the streets -- John, North, Clark, Broad, Chapel -- for almost exactly 70 years. But not for almost 40. Now Roosevelt's a name on a condo, and playing fields that were themselves once coal yards, where I played in a sandbox, are now town houses on Summit's "Park Avenue."

Rhythmic Whistles, Siren Frequencies

The whistle, or is it the horn, is prominent and joyful from the first car (7282) on my 6:54 on a Friday. And so too a little more than a half a mile away, at home. Ms. S. says she can hear my train arriving. I  love the rhythmic clickety-clack -- the pleasant, half-drunken playful dance of sway.

Or perhaps it's just the 16-oz. Bud kicking in.

Over the weekend, I mentioned aloud how Summit used to have a 12 o'clock and a 5 o'clock whistle, which was really a war-like siren exhaled at the fire house and heard all across town. In my kitchen we had a blue, civil defense placard on the knotty-pine wainscotting that told us what the different siren frequencies signaled  in the event of an emergency.

Gin Mills and Dive Bars

Union Place used to boast not one, but two, dive bars, one at each end; Summit House to the west and Blue Door to the east. Caves, with dim lights and worn linoleum and 35-cent, 6-7-ounce drafts. Today? Never. The liquor licenses have always been scarce as hen's teeth in towns like Summit, which fixed their number since Prohibition was repealed. So the licenses were always valuable. But especially after 1982 there was a ready supply of buyers prepared to snap them up at unheard of multiples and invest, hope, pray, speculate, launder, who knows? See, passim, The Summit House, The Blue Door Tavern, Uncle Mike's.

Missing Monday Morning

What's missing, apart from the commerce, the hustle of above-ground, out-in-the-open, licit business? Look at the rows of houses, the dwindling stock of brick apartment buildings, the scarce tenements. Behind all of them, no clotheslines, no Monday morning wash hanging and swinging in the bracing, birdsong-choked air of early March.

The Tool Next Door

Is it the White People's Express or the Meathead Express? It's tough to decide; and I'm not quite sure it matters. Suffice it to say the man to my right "watched" an action movie on his laptop as he scanned his smartphone and ate popcorn, all the while coughing, drinking bottled water, with earbuds in the quiet car on last night's 6:54. I left him heading west to Chatham, thankful I wasn't going to Morris County.

Townies

I'm told by a friend I jokingly asked last week -- a lifelong resident of Pearl River, NY -- that even if you grow up in a town and leave for college and move away for 30 years before returning in midlife, you are still a townie. Why do I hope so?

It's a cacophony of coughing, a surround sound symphony of hacking lungs on this Friday morning 8:48 express. They're coming from every side and angle but the window and, even then, appeal for an end run around your shoulder and arm rest.

Front of the Car Triptych

It is a dizzyingly odd, strangely disquieting and disorienting perspective to sit in the fourth row of the first Arrow car on the 8:48, with the sights and the landmarks rushing by the front window and each side, a crazy quilt panoramic triptych. A different perspective even then the single view of the driver, and so very different from driving a car. The rising mid-February sun climbs in the right side of the train, pouring in from the south.

"Can you let me out?," the well-spoken Asian student to my left asks before Newark Broad Street. Nary a please, an excuse me or pardon me. So goes courtesy, so goes civil discourse.

Looking out at the deteriorated, 110-year-old walls of the Newark/Roseville cut, and later, Harrison, you wonder how will we ever get anything built again?

More simply, why the Morris & Essex? Why not Morris & Hudson? Or Morris, Union and Essex? All the affluent white people. Where do they all come from?

Teardowns and Davaning

I love looking out at my old Huntley neighborhood in the morning. Spotting the occasional, unmistakable  teardown. Seeing the twinkling light or the darkened house. Thinking and reflecting. Remembering putting pennies down on the track and running away for cover and coming back for the bent remnant. Remembering the devilish freedom of mischief night. Of Halloween, a two-day celebration. A disastrous, abandoned backyard sleepover in a tent below these same tracks, with Kurt Hall and another boy whose face I can half discern, but not his name; they who loved to spit and conduct liquid materials experiments a little too much.

I saw a woman today on the 8:48, my regular, after Millburn, as we made the express run to Newark. She was standing and I was about to offer her the empty seat next to mine, when I saw she was reading a red leather bound book. But when I saw her davaning, bending and bowing to God, I thought it best not to disturb her.

These same hills, these same Orange ridges. You used to be able to take a train to Binghamton or Buffalo or Chicago, right here from Summit. In a way, there was more commerce then, certainly along this right of way, this corridor of passengers and sidings, industry and freight.

Separate

Friday Dec. 30, 2011. First week, Day 4, before I begin taking things for granted. Half moon above the meadows. A group of three young women board the quiet car in Brick Church, next stop Summit (why?) Or, they moved cars. Barely spoke a word. Remarkable. (I'd've thought the same of three young men.)

This morning, the second that I waited half an hour for the 8:48, having missed the 8:17 by a fraction, I took a walk and found more Summit remnants. The elongated J on the south side of The Jeanette Shop on Maple. Original DL&W fencing behind the coin shop, just east of Railroad Avenue across from the Opera House. (Remember dusty Hill City Stamp & Coin on the second floor on Maple?) Another piece of original railing at Union Place east of Maple. Original sewer grates on the north side of Railroad Avenue, lost amid trees and shrubs, from when it was an open street with tall red-brick warehouses, pre-dating the senior citizens' housing, but no church any longer on Chestnut. No Kozy Korner in my morning meander, killing time. No falling down, ramshackle eyesores on Broad Street, across from the fire house, however poverty quaint and poverty romantic -- from the outside.

Instead, today, I looked in a window and found empty stools and a counter at the (not yet open) Summit Food Market on Springfield. A little bookstore where the Strand once stood, a sushi and Japanese steakhouse ditto.

Moving back to my hometown is so very odd, particularly at my advanced age, with a young family. I am moving backward and forward in time, simultaneously, separate from those who never left, separate from those a continent away.