Have you ever found it frightening that once you have learnt
someone's name, their existence becomes part of your memory and
consciousness; have you ever regretted not striking up a conversation
with some strangers you found interesting at a station, on a train
sitting next to you, or minding their own business at a Starbucks yet
all the while seeking an antidote for loneliness. Missed opportunities
of, there's a Chinese word for it, Yuan Fen, as we hustle underneath
this dome of azure.
There's an old man on platform 212
of Port Authority Bus Terminal, NYC, origin of coordinates
that connects the forbidden paradise of spinning life in the big apple,
and the suburban reality that people settle back in with their children
and pet, their lawns that need to be mowed, well, last week, and a squeaky
side door they have just put on the to do list for the next leisure Sunday
brunch hour. The husband would take out the tool box as the wife prepare
for scrabbled eggs, homemade, somewhat experimental, peanut butter
pancake and cold slices of bananas on top of hot oatmeal.
The
old man, whose name I'm still reluctant to find out, pays no attention
to any of that details of everyday life, those tiresome, never ending
chores for young couples who haven't gotten their feet on the ground,
still fighting for survival with salaries that barely cover the rent,
food, train tickets to go home once in a while to visit parents and
siblings, whom they talk of with loving loathe and argue with in shame
and pride; oh yeah, and occasional rush tickets to some Broadway plays,
which they would call extravagant expenditure with a sophisticated
purpose and a smart aura what can smooth out the self justification.
No,
the old man never pays attention to any of that. He's probably in his
70s, or a young 80s; he's lived through two world wars and a couple of
economy plunges thrown in here and there during his lifetime; and
hunger, and despair of an entire nature; and now he's got a stable life,
still healthy and without hardship thanks to his conscientiously done
lifesaving. He usually wears a plaid shirt, the color of which is close
to a crossover between pink and beige, and a pair of brown tennis shoes
with a Loui Vuitton brand mark on the side, which he probably bought at Marshall's for their comfort and any other practical reasons rather than
their semi snobbish last name connected to those rubber soles. He wears a
pair of glasses with metal frames, round edged, slender and sensibly
made at a least trendy but decent optician of traditional high quality.
And jeans: blue, over-washed. He holds a dogeared pamphlet, in which numbers and letters are tightly
woven together that looks like what you'd see inside of a beehive. Those are bus schedules with notes of up to date changes he jots down in the margin. He flips it through, cross examining its accuracy; sometimes when the platform is not too crowded, he would play crosswords and sudoku on the newspaper; he would fold the paper into a tight square he could keep in his palm; he would tap it with a pencil, trying to figure out the next letter or number to put down.
I
usually see him in the middle of three winded queues stuffed in the
small space of platform 212, on each side of which are half-vandalized
schedule plates with outdated schedules. And at 3:02 pm, you can hear
him, "NEXT WILL BE 165 LOCAL AT THREE O FIVE, UPFRONT GOING TO WESTWOOD.
GO RIGHT UP FRONT IF YOU'RE GOING TO BOULEVARD EAST!" and he yells to
the dispassionate crowd whose shoulders bend with invisible cocoons that
they weaved themselves with misery and hot musky airs in the offices,
in the streets with panhandlers and toddlers yelling and screaming for
no particular reasons.
And then it's 3:08, after half of the crowd squeezed out of the lean space of the boxed platform like a tube of
toothpaste, new commuters arrived and attached themselves to the rear.
I'm now in the exact middle point of everything, hostile and stagnant,
irritable crowd with mundane, but nevertheless life-and-death matters on
their mind, not in the mood to talk, or chatting away loudly on their
phone in Spanish or Korean, neither of which I can eavesdrop even if I
wished to.
And still there's the old man's raspy voice, not too loud but you can hear each syllable clearly:
"NEXT BUS AT THREE TEN 166 EXPRESS AT DOOR 1. MOVE UPFRONT IF YOU'RE WAITING FRO BUS 166"
And
now it's 3:16. If I'm very lucky, there will be only a handful of
people outside of door 2 waiting for 168, and I would be able to lean on
the glass wall with my au bon pain soup or deli store sushi before the
hour long ride into Teaneck. The claustrophobic space can be
existentially large when your mind starts to wander off to some other dimensions. "He's a little late today," I hear him talking to a passenger who looks like he's going to experience an anxiety attack, "usually 168 comes a few minutes before 3:15, and it takes off on the dot. Be patient." He mutters to himself with a smile that seems to have engraved between the lines on his face: "He's a little late today. Oh there it is!"
I see the bus pulling in with a humming sound. I follow the queue and one by one passengers start to push through the glass door and step into the bus, spacious enough for a person of normal size to turn and dash to their seat, yet doesn't allow you too much liberty to move around or start feeling the rhythms form your headphones.
The old man would greet each one of the passengers as they pass by him, whether there's a response, a nod back, or a blank stare, sometimes even resentful as if saying: mind your own business you old nuisance. But he never seems to be effected one way or another.
Usually I don't say a word to the old man except once in a while there's a "have a good one", or "how do you do", or just a smile as I push through the glass door that links the platform and the bus, both of which seem to like a pair of suspended space that don't exist in reality but rather, two metaphorical entities that carry me from one phase to another. And the old man, as if the only constant factor within that ever-evolving organism, remains nameless yet indispensable, to platform 212.
One time we got to talking, don't even ask why, or how the chattering started because I never knew... it was one of those situations that just felt right to strike up a conversation, to ask a question that has always been on my mind, on everyone's mind, we the regulars of platform 212. The old man, I found out, employed himself as a guide at the transit center. "I know most of the information on this route." he says, still smiling that engraved smile, "Not all the buses here, but these, the ones that goes on Boulevard East, I know them in the back of my head." he says. "And I like to be with people, and offer them help." he says. Sometimes he would linger by the ticketing booth and teach travelers how to use the self-service ticketing machines. I started complaining about how often they break down and give me a hard time. He smiles and keeps on talking what he does on platform 212.
Sometimes I'm there at a different time and the old man isn't there. He's as though a house elf of the platform 212, only appearing at the busiest hours. Have you ever felt a place empty where there's just one person missing? And that old man, is like an old tree that makes up an entire forest.
Maybe tomorrow I'll ask him, "sir, what's your name?"
