The old lady had a look of merriment – not often seen in the subway.
She was talking to herself and talking to strangers around her, trying to create a bit of community on the F train, creeping its way toward the City, as we people from Queens call Manhattan. I love my occasional rides into The City from near my old neighborhood – legal parking on Midland Parkway right in front of Trump’s old house, between 10 to 4, just right for lunch. I particularly love these day trips for the interplay between the young and the old, the mixture of ethnicities. Queens. Benign and hopeful and so very American. Never losing her smile, the old lady apologized, in Spanish, to the woman on her right for jostling her, thereby waking her from a quick nap. She smiled at a man standing up and pointed to an empty seat next to me. He declined. Then the old lady began to pay rapt attention to the woman on her left – a much younger woman of Asian ancestry, making up her face, no easy task on a train lurching noisily on mismatched rails. The younger woman was applying makeup to her cheeks and then she began to touch up her eyebrows, an intricate maneuver requiring a surgeon’s touch. The older lady followed every stroke as if she were watching an Olympic event – curling, maybe. She had a rapt smile, perhaps being reminded of her younger self. Her smile was still beautiful. The younger woman pretended not to notice. Upgraded, she put away her kit and stared straight ahead. The older lady had two shopping bags on the floor and a bag on her lap. Her tights, under her topcoat, had a couple of holes. She inspected a black man in a topcoat standing near me. “Muy bonitos,” she said, pointing to his well-shined shoes. Several times she made eye contact with me and I smiled back. She was making me happy with her merry but somewhat melancholy smile. She deserved a smile. She pointed to her imaginary watch, the universal sign. “Mediodia, menos unos minutes,” I said. Big smile. The young woman on her left got off at 63rd and Lexington. Another woman of Asian background took her place, also young, also pretty. The old lady said something to her in English. The young woman looked her in the eye and responded, sweetly. They chatted for a minute or two. Then the older lady resumed her soft, sweet, bilingual monologue more or less to herself. In Spanish she said she liked to cook but could not afford it. She rubbed thumb and forefinger, indicating no money. “Donde va hoy?” I asked her. “Wherever somebody will buy me a drink,” she said in Spanish, giggling. She made the universal sign of a glass being tipped to her lips. I was getting off at Herald Square. “Buen dia,” I said, getting a big smile. I hope she’s all right. * * * Something nice often happens on my rides. One day I saw an abuelita struggling upstairs with shopping bags at 179th St. “Pesadas,” I said. Heavy. And I lugged them to her bus stop for east Queens. * * * A year ago I saw a couple of young (white) innocents get on the E train at 23rd and Ely, from one of those expensive high rises looming up in Long Island City – two girls, maybe just out of college, probably staked by parents to an expensive new condo, one stop from the City. One innocent, clearly an out-of-towner, had a large wallet or maybe an iPad sticking out of the back pocket of her designer jeans – three or four inches of value, exposed, for the swiping. An older Chinese woman waved her index finger at the young woman, as if to say, “Put that thing in your bag.” The innocent smiled, clueless. The older Chinese woman persisted, as a granny would. The innocent’s friend got the point and the valuable was safely stowed. The granny smiled, grimly, and that was that. * * * A few months ago, I saw another elderly Chinese woman, also on the E train, pointing to a young African-American woman, standing up, holding an infant. The older lady was pointing to an empty seat. The young woman smiled and nodded to the door, to indicate she was getting off at the next stop. One New Yorker taking care of another. You see that a lot. My friends from out there in America tell me that New Yorkers are always offering help with street maps or the maze of a huge subway station. Then again, I remember salarymen and women offering me help – in English -- with the strange addresses of Tokyo. And people walking us a few blocks in Cairo or Mumbai. The old babushkas of Moscow making sure my wife got off at the right bus stop for the circus. It’s a city thing.
Alan D. Levine
2/16/2018 02:07:00 pm
Wonderful piece, George. I've always wondered how those young women applying their makeup on the subway don't poke their eyes out when the train lurches.
Alana Gibson-Akong
2/16/2018 11:05:54 pm
Yes. It certainly is a city thing.
George
2/17/2018 07:46:09 am
I must admit, I was fascinated by how intricate her process was. I could see the result, step by step. Surely an urban art. Better than curling, for sure. GV
Judy Hart Fishkin
2/17/2018 06:07:33 pm
(transferred from her email by permission of Judy Hart Fishkin, the co-editor of our Jamaica High yearbook - GV)
Mendel
2/18/2018 01:50:53 am
Its a city thing, George.
ahron horowitz
2/18/2018 09:40:57 am
its a city thing and there is nothing like our city
George Vecsey
2/18/2018 10:58:17 am
Alana Gibson-Akong and Horowitz Pere et fils: absolutely right. I guess not so much after 10 AM, which is when I can park for free in front of Trump's gaudy former domicile a/k/a Tara.
Michael Schwab
2/20/2018 01:19:42 pm
(Our dear friend, Michael Schwab, retired County Superior Justice in Washington State, used to ride the E and F train, growing up a few blocks from Jamaica High. With Michael’s permission, this is an excerpt from his reply, including frequent homecomings with his beautiful late wife, Jane Sarmiento Schwab, Ph. D.: Comments are closed.
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Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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