Lady on a Train

Hey! Check out this awesome blog: Every Person in New York
 - a project by an artist trying to draw every person in NYC! I freaking love this.

I took the Rapid downtown in the early evening for a reception I was attending for work, because I was fretting about where to park and I realized that the train would be infinitely easier. This shouldn't be such an unusual line of thought for me. I love public transportation. I wish it worked better here, by which I mean that I wish the schedules were more extensive (near my house, buses only run on an arcane and totally inconvenient and infrequent schedule) and the system more user-friendly for new riders. I have cried more than once out of frustration and helpless confusion while trying to navigate the system here. Really. And I have negotiated the transit systems of many cities with grace and style.

But this evening, it was fab. A coworker even handed me a bus pass, thus quelling my eternal anxiety about how to pay for riding. (A worry that only besets me in this city, where sometimes you pay when you get on, sometimes when you get off, sometimes on board, sometimes at a kiosk, sometimes with exact change only. Sometimes you even have to pay twice, and if you are not prepared for that it is really inconvenient.) And I got to sit and think and read. Read! Reading on the train! This is the most civilized of actions -- sitting on a public train and reading a book. This is something I want more of in my life. Here, there, anywhere.

It will only happen more here if I move to a part of town more convenient to regularly scheduled routes or if we all somehow come to decide to better fund public transportation so that there can be better coverage all over. Sadly, we won't better fund it until more people choose to use it (recognizing that there are many people who can't afford cars and so don't have a choice) and that won't happen if they have no meaningful opportunity to ... seems a catch-22. I will say, that coming back from my event, I was on a train half full of well-dressed office workers on their evening commute ... some people are choosing.

While we're at it -- let's fund light rail between Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati!

Reading: Nearing the end of Carry the One. An interesting thing happens with POV as the end draws nearer. It has been a rotating POV all along, but generally chapter to chapter. Now it rotates much more frequently. Also, I like how the leaps of time happen with little or no explanation (this ties in with the lack of unnecessary connective tissue I wrote about last week or the week before).

I plan to pick up Possession by AS Byatt next. I have read this before, more than once, and it is a book that has been an inspiration to me. I am needing a refresher.

Writing: Yes, and making a widget list of things I need to do to get the ms into a penultimate draft.

Dinner: Kid-made mac and cheese and broccoli, and part of a salad leftover from a work meeting.

Soundtrack: Coltrane radio

Random thing: It is National Poetry Month ... maybe I should do random poems for the month ... like I sort of did love songs in February? Dear reader, what thinkst thou? Today, I will share on of my favorites ...

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
  by e e cummings 

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15401#sthash.CS0JoF1W.dpuf