A college professor once pointed out to me that the New York City subway is one of the world's great equalizers. As simply the fastest way to get around city, and at under $3.00 a ride, its accessibility is matchless. The bankers, well-coiffed and fresh from their lunchtime shave, unburdened with bags (maybe an occasional ipad) share seats with dental hygienists and medical administrators, program assistants; hoisting purses, reusable grocery totes filled with lunchtime tupperware, gym duffels for the disciplined. The indigent, abandoned by the city's services, ask us for change, for a meal, for eye contact. A man practicing his vocals for the musical parody of a certain shocking(ly popular) erotic trilogy; no fewer than three devout worshipers following prayers with their fingers the next morning.
Then there are the moments when the boundaries between us - headphoned, noses in books, asleep - flake away, and those are the small moments when we are alike one another, closer. Maybe it's a small kindness, picking up a child's shoe. Maybe it's simply that the towheaded, professorial fellow who is almost finished reading Freedom, and who is holding onto a bar above my head, actually doesn't mind that his body has assumed a shape of holding mine on a crowded train.
Tom Wolfe said that "One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years." Perhaps this is no truer than on the subway, when we all smush together, literally supported by the bodies of other people, belonging to the tedium of a commute and secretly glad for the company of others.
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