
Monday, August 18, 2014
Merrily We Roll Along
In a few weeks I will be arriving at Logan airport from Canada after participating in my granddaughter's wedding celebration. The schedule says shortly after 5pm, I don't think coming from Canada entails elaborate custom delays, and there is an Amtrak train for New York at maybe six thirty. So I will try for that, not, I think, by waiting for that bus to thread its way through the airport traffic, called the Silver Line, I believe, and on to South Station. Maybe hailing a taxi would be better. Why when they remodeled Logan Airport did the office of Governor Dukakdis, great train lover put rails from there to town, instead having to use cars? Will there be lines? Will a taxi get stuck in traffic? The airfare to New York seems absurdly high, although there is something for $45 to Newark. Google is such a joke, a whore in the pay of all the various airlines; you have to read through so much verbiage of the shill to try to find what used to be called "information" In the real world a single list of every plane taking off from Logan and landing at one of NYC's airports and the time of departure would be both logical and very helpful. I guess there are buses if there is no later train. I am thinking of my granddaughter (not the one getting married) starting college this fall in the Midwest. She will have her own car so that she can come back for a visit and, as they all say, "do her laundry." I can't help but wonder if it were not a lot cheaper to put a bunch of quarters in a machine in the dorm than pay for gasoline to come home. My heart goes out to all these suburban families who are counting every penny as grown up children eat into the income more vigorously every year. The first big bite they took was when they got a car. Not the charming rite du passage one imagines from overdosing on films with Mickey and Judy, no, but an absolute necessity where what passes for a town has no sidewalks and getting from place to place is either at the convenience of a parent or the youngster when old enough for a driver's license. A recent neighbor of mine, on a very low income, and pretty desperate, had four cars and a pickup truck out in front of his exceedingly modest dwelling where three sons set out each morning to their jobs. How do you move up the ladder when you first of all have to shell out for wheels, then gas all the time for your commute, and maybe pay off the car in time to buy another five or so years down the line. Having grown up in a Midwestern village in the Depression I thought most everyone walked, and I was not disabused of that notion when I moved to Boston and then to New York. It was California where I first learned at age thirty the true horror of the American dream, the freeway, the absence of public transportation, although I once spent time at a cocktail party with a very cool young gentleman who when I commiserated with him on his very very lengthy commute on the traffic laden Santa Ana Freeway, allowed as how the constant and lengthy pauses gave him time to himself--no wife, no kids, no boss--, time for his favorite kind of music, time for smoking good dope, time for jerking off if the mood overcame him. The cellphone has put paid to that kind of bliss of privacy, drivers on every side of me down here in Florida are moving along in the most incredible varieties of stop and start and slow and fast as I see them bent over their text messages, occasionally darting a glance at the road ahead. Since the Florida drivers have an unlimited right to turn right on red, the pedestrian, poor fellow, is even more the deer caught in the headlights. God bless them, they deserved better, I think.
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