Grieving to Love

Recently, I had a chance to spend some time away from my day-to-day environment and take some serious time for reflection. During these days spent in a remote part of the Catskill Mountains, I was able to use a journal to let me capture my thoughts and feelings as they came to me in the quiet of the mountain setting. I was focused on some heavy topics and when I read the words I had written, I tried to capture their essence in poems. Why, I do not know. As I wrote in a previous posting, I have not written a poem in over forty-five years and although I do enjoy reading, poetry is not a format that attracts me.

There is good and bad in almost every aspect of living. Most of us spend our life time trying to sort the good from the bad and aspire toward the good and agonize when we gravitate to the bad. Most religious teaching we have experienced tend to emphasize the dichotomy between good and evil choices. This is certainly true for me. I want blue skies and no rain, want peace with no war, joy without grief. With lots of help, my time in the mountains has opened me to accept that there are no blue skies full of flowers and trees without the nourishment of rain. In fact the rains provide a chance for me to slow down and rescue myself from my busyness. Can I truly expect to know joy without having faced the agony of grief?

Grieving To Love

Near and far, my fears they lie,

Yet I do escape them bye and bye.

It is not the fear that is the beast.

It is the grief on which fear feasts.

The grief in me keeps sinking deep,

It reaches down, right through my feet.

Grief winds around my every bone,

Chills my flesh, it eats my soul.

Grief fills my mind with blackest ink.

It chokes all joy, my will to think.

I am transfixed afraid to move.

Grief, oh grief what more to prove?

How do I face this grief so bold?

Where do I turn, whom do I hold?

Easy say some, "To Jesus, brother."

But where was I when He did suffer?

Did I help Job in all his sorrows?

Did I save Joseph in the burrow?

Did I tell Jonah, I will join you?

I judge I need to earn my rescue.

I am like Adam who had all for nothing,

But wanted more by his own working?

Grief has me blinded, my pride kicks in

I become the "god", my original sin.

At last I know my grief is real.

It is with me from head to heel.

My grief is now a tomb of stone,

Show me the way, let me atone.

I fear each thought, each pulse, each pore

Will urge my grief to travel more,

Reach through the bone into the marrow,

Make me regret each new tomorrow.

There's nothing left but to embrace it,

Let grief itself become the prophet,

Let its hard lesson to me be

The guiding light to set me free.

Buddy Can You Spare Me $700,000,000,000?

I do want to help my vast readership better understand some of the physical aspects of the proposed bailout plan now being discussed on the floor of Congress. I will leave the economic analysis to the only American capable of understanding the complexity of the full bailout proposal, Jim Cramer of CNBC's "Mad Money Show". During the last great economic crisis, poor unfortunates on the streets of America (in today's lingo – Main Street America) were brazenly asking us to spare them a dime without any hint of oversight or guarantees of repayment. At least in this millennium's crisis we have a congress with the backbone to demand that missing oversight and those guarantees. Of course, this congress is asking us for seven trillion dimes. That is 15,868,000 metric tons of dimes.

Now this might be hard to follow, but the next few paragraphs will not only give a better feeling for the magnitude of the bailout, it will also point out four specific industries that will be saved by the bailout. Here are some physical properties of the $700 billion bailout:

• Weight: A dollar bill weighs about one gram. Therefore 700 billion one-dollar bills would weigh about 700,000 metric tons, about eight days' worth of all U.S. paper production, or the combined tonnage of seven Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.
  



• Height: A dollar bill is 0.1 centimeters in height. Stacked one on top of the other, 700 billion dollar bills would form a pile 52,000 miles high, roughly a quarter of the way to the moon.
  



• Length: The length of a dollar bill is 15.6 centimeters. End to end longwise, 700 billion bills would stretch 65 million miles, two-thirds of the way to the Sun.
  



• Area: A dollar bill is 15.6 cm x 6.63 cm, or 103 square centimeters. Arranged in a big square, 700 billion bills would carpet 2,800 square miles, a swathe of land twice as big as Rhode Island and half the size of L.A. County.

Now it would not be practical to pay the bailout monies in one dollar bills so let's say we use new crisp $100 bills. We are giving these bills to Wall Street executives and bankers so leather attaché cases are appropriate. I found a nice one thanks to Google. It is made of calf leather and is sixteen by twelve by four inches. It will take 7,056,445 of these briefcases to hold the entire bailout [US luggage industry is now officially saved]. A cow hide is approximately thirty-one square feet. Each briefcase needs about two and one half square feet of calf leather for manufacture. This work requires over 705,666 cow hides to be purchased [US beef cattle industry is now officially saved].

In the year 2004 there were 1,814,491 people working in the US banking industry. The bailout will provide just about three attaché cases of cash for each banker or, more exactly, $365,794. [US banking industry is now officially saved]. I also thought that each member of Congress and each person working in the banking industry should receive a copy of the new Amazon.com release, "Mortgage Backed Securities for Dummies". This would be 535 copies for Congress and the 1,814,491 for the bankers and would be a boost for the publishing industry. [US publishing industry is now officially saved].

What is my contribution in all of this? In 2007 there were 138,000,000 US taxpayers. In the Pondit's household we have two taxpayers. My wife and I will soon "own" $10,145 worth of mortgage backed securities that the government will be buying. That is worth about as much as a new Chevy Silverado, which GM is currently deeply discounting so it can get these vehicles off their books and into the hands of the general public. Will I be required to foreclose on a fellow citizen's home in order to get back my share of the bailout money?

The Breath of Life

The Breath of Life

 

Arise my soul and face your fears.

You cling to life with passion dear.

I am your vessel that I be,

The I in me that would be free.

 

And as I journey, full of strife,

I long for peace, I lust for life.

But peace to me goes still wanted,

My soul's unrest keeps me haunted.

 

Come then death, life's nether half,

You're but a stop on life's short path.

Death grant to me a single breath,

Alas the one that marks my death.

 

Yet this same breath is the sacred air

That wakes my soul to let me bear

The expectation I've been longing,

My journey's end, my Easter morning.

 

This is the first poem I have written since I wrote a sonnet to my high school sweetheart in spring of 1963. The rust is evident. Today is the first full day of autumn. It denotes the beginning of harvest time. It is time of transition for us all. Our days now move from mostly day to mostly night. The glorious plants and flowers we enjoyed in spring and summer, now must die. But it is through their death that we are nourished. We have grain and fruits to eat and even the plants themselves need this dying to seeds in order to sprout again next spring thus renewing the cycle of living.

 

At first no one is comfortable "knocking on heaven's door." But it took a glimpse of death, a touch of dying to give me a fuller appreciation of life and all its beauty. We are all going to die. My goal is not to let the fear of death ruin my joy for life. I will try to embrace the need for death to give nourishment and the promise of new life and use that message so evident in God's nature to continue to reveal the hidden glories of living.

Post 9/11: Have I Learned Anything?

Thursday my posting, Train 911, described my personal observations on September 11, 2001 – a day of infamy for the USA and the world. I was very fortunate not to suffer any personal loss that day. I know others who did. My heart continues to ache for them. I cannot write about their suffering or even begin to understand their loss. But 9/11 is a "tipping point" for many Americans. Some have changed dramatically and are "different" people. Others, like me, are just coming to understand how both our personal and collective responses to the tragedy have altered our lives. If an historic event such as the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon do not cause us to reflect on the event and our response, what will? Here are some of the profound and much less profound life lessons the tragedy and responses to that tragedy on 9/11 have had on me:

• I am fully convinced that I will never be able to understand what mental and emotional processes can enable a human being to perform wanton acts of destruction toward other human beings.
  
• It has taken me years to fully admit and come to grips with the instantaneous prejudice 9/11 caused me to have toward Arabs and Moslems. Due to the magnitude and senselessness of the 9/11 attacks, I needed somewhere to vent my rage. I internalized this prejudice and over the first few months/years after the attacks, I might have spoken of forgiveness, but harbored resentment. I still need to confront myself in this area, but now realize that the attack was planned and carried out by very few people, who happened to be both Arab and Moslem. This does not mean that all Arabs and Moslems are bad people.
  
• I better understand that all religions surround us with holy people and saints that provide wonderful models for living a better life. Religious writings and rites help me better understand my relationship with God and the people around me. I am also aware that religious people are not necessarily good people; some are evil. The events of 9/11 made me leery of the Koran and of Moslem leaders. I had never read the Koran or met a Moslem imam and perhaps this lack of knowledge added to my discomfort. More recently, I have reflected on how Christians from Spain, Portugal, France, England and the United States either killed or dispossessed all Native Americans from the Hudson Bay in Canada to the tip of Argentina in South America. My religious beliefs provide me with the opportunity for more insight and tolerance, but no religion guarantees instant holiness!
  
• Wars are not good for people! Unfortunately, people are good at wars! But the US is not that good at wars when the enemy is not a nation. For example, in 1964 Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty. This was a very noble cause. Poverty in the United States dropped from 22% in 1959 to 19% in 1964 a decrease of 3%. But the nation rightfully believed that 19% are too many Americans living in poverty. During the next forty years we fought the War on Poverty and we reduced those living in poverty to 12% of the population. I have to tell you that I do not get warm and fuzzy feelings that in forty years we have only reduced the percentage of people living in poverty by seven percentage points. With our growth in population, there are more people living in poverty then when we started this war. We have most likely lost this war. We are also waging a War on Drugs in the United States. My thoughts are that we are doing slightly better fighting against drugs than against poverty. In this fight we have spent over $35 billion dollars by some estimates and now America has the largest percentage of its population incarcerated than any other nation in the world. Drug use is reported to be down. Perhaps if we can keep drugs out of our prisons and incarcerate 100% of the population, we can declare this war as won!
  
• Now we are aggressively engaged in a War on Terror. This war was declared in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States that killed 3,056 civilians. Again the United States is waging war against an ill defined enemy. In this war the US has already lost 4,155 troops in Iraq, and 589 troops in Afghanistan. The US government acknowledges over 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed by violent military causes and other estimates put the total Iraqi civilian deaths at 1,255,026. The US military expenses in Iraq are estimated to be $2.5 billion per week. Homeland Security spent $69,107,000,000 in 2006. Although, we have not had any repeat of a terrorist attack in the US – that's a very good thing – I wonder if some of the $3.8 billion dollars a week we are spending in this War on Terror could be better spent to fight cancer that is killing over 1,500 Americans each and every week.
  
• Richard Rohr, A Franciscan priest and author, writes, "The three great demons are fear, guilt and anger." In his first inaugural speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt told us, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts…" I believe fear is the goal of terrorism. If it is, then we are losing this war also. Look at us. We are constructing walls at our borders similar to the great fences strung across Australia to keep the animal pests out of the grazing lands. We are restricting visits to our country and in rebuttal are having restrictions put on Americans who want to travel abroad. We are permitting our government to monitor all our email and phone conversations. We allow someone to designate a person as an enemy combatant and then be put in jail with no legal recourse whatsoever. We tolerate the torture of people in the fear of a potential terrorist action. I believe we have allowed our fear of terrorism and desire for safety, to let us subrogate the very freedom and values that make America the great country it is.
  
• Who has won the airport security battle? On the US side we have had no successful terrorist actions at our airports in 2008. This is a battle we seem to have won. Then again we all allow at least one additional hour at the airport to get through security and make our flight. Last year there were 675,000,000 airline passengers in the United States. Besides the cost to provide airport security, American airline passengers invested a minimum of 675,000,000 hours or 77,054 man years waiting in line at the airport. Each passenger must also remove his or her shoes because one person (terrorist?) attempted to place an incendiary device in his shoe. That means 1,350,000,000 shoes are removed and replaced each year at the airport and giving that it takes two minutes to take off and replace those shoes, Americans invest an additional 5,137 man years in shoe shuffling. I trust the TSA has found enough shoe bombs to justify this activity!
  

I apologize for using these trite examples. I just want to make certain we realize we have let fear of terrorism affect our lives. Unfortunately, many of the not so trite examples are a much greater threat to our American values. I am certainly not done with my learning process, but it is clear to me that both the cost of the 9/11 tragedy and the cost of our nation's response to the tragedy are way beyond the value of any personal wisdom I might gain.

Train 911

One spectacular September morning I make my regular morning commute to New York City. There is not a cloud in the sky and the air feels "country" fresh even in midtown Manhattan. My regular train, the 7:42 from Cortlandt, arrives at Grand Central Terminal at 8:39 AM. I sit near the rear of the train and it takes several minutes for me to get from the train to the main lobby of the terminal. As I am a creature of habit when commuting, I walk out the entrance from the corridor in GCT through the subway's 42^nd Street Shuttle station finally emerging in the majestic lobby of the Lincoln Building. I glance at the bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln sitting in a chair, a replica of the one that is so striking at his memorial in Washington. Abe is a symbol of quiet strength to me, a strength sprinkled with conventional wisdom and tolerance.

I exit the Lincoln Building on Madison Avenue, then cross the street and walk up 43^rd Street to Fifth Avenue. I pause at the corner directly across from the New York City Library. What a day! As I mentioned before, clear blue skies and not one cloud east, west or north. I did notice a low white puffy cloud drifting over lower Manhattan as I looked south.

I continue on to my office building at Broadway and 37^th Street. When I get to our small office on the fourteenth floor, it is no different than the day before or the week before. The time is now about 8:55 AM. Suddenly one of my coworkers jumps up from his cubicle and shouts, "A plane has crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers!" I quickly try to bring up the CNN internet site. S…L…O…W. I try the local WNBC site with no better luck. We are all thinking that some small single engine plane is involved in the accident. We cannot get any information. Soon after, I get a call from a colleague in our London office. He wants to know if everything was all right in our office. I ask, "Why?" It is now about 9:10 AM. He tells me that two airliners have crashed into the WTC towers. He is looking for details about the incident from me and here I am only a mile or two from the site and I know almost nothing. I ask him to keep us informed.

I try to call my wife but cannot get an outside line on my office phone or my cell phone. Another coworker comes into the office. He had just been on the roof of our building. He tells us he could see smoke coming from both towers downtown. The mood in the office is now half shock and half panic. We are getting little or no information, but still rumors are flying. I receive a second call from London and they say these incidents are reported as terrorist attacks. At 9:30 three of us decide to go up to the roof to take a look. It was heart wrenching. The smoke from the two towers looks ominous. We could only see the top of the towers, maybe the top thirty to forty floors. We hear and see a few helicopters and some sirens down at street level. I then glance over my left shoulder as I here fighter jets zooming in. I am aware of the looming Empire State Building just three streets and one avenue away from where we are standing. It occurs to me that the roof is not a place I want to be and leave by myself to go back downstairs.

There is still no way for us to communicate to the outside world. Someone finds a radio and at least we get some information on what was happening. Soon that radio is moved to another office and we again have no news! Many of us, me included, want to be home and not in Manhattan. Just after 10:00 AM the two coworkers I left on the roof burst back into the office. All I here is, "It collapsed! It collapsed!" After what seems like minutes, we finally learn that they were watching the towers and in seconds one of the towers was just not there anymore. The plume of smoke and debris was enormous. Now I really want to get home.

I decide to walk to Grand Central Terminal. Once outside on Broadway, there are people walking not only on the sidewalks but right up the middle of the street. All foot traffic is moving north. There are no cars, no buses, and no taxis. People look frightened. At one point, there is a loud noise – people start running in all directions. Others seeing the runners also start running. It makes no sense and lots of sense. I step into a doorway and soon all is again calm and is back to "normal", although I soon realize that "normal" is soon to be changed forever. The police are not letting people into the train station. Someone comes out and tells those assembled that some trains are running up to Marble Hill in the Bronx but not any further south. Marble Hill is a several mile walk from midtown.

When I return to the office, I learn the South tower has also collapsed. Some coworkers are already leaving on foot. I do not know what to do. I take another trip to the roof top. Now the skies are totally quiet. There are no planes and no helicopters. It is an eerie sight. I still worry about the Empire State Building, but feel relieved that there is no air traffic at all in New York City. By now I also know about the crash at the Pentagon and another in Pennsylvania. I want out of the city. Just before 2:00 PM I leave the office to head north, to Marble Hill if necessary. The streets are more crowded than earlier with people walking north. Some are obviously from downtown since they are covered with ash. As I passed GCT I see some people entering at the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance. I follow them in. A policeman tells us that some trains are now running, but there is no schedule. Fortunately there is a train to Poughkeepsie right in front of me. I walk down the platform and take a seat. The train is very quiet. Many passengers are like me, somewhat in the dark about the day's events. Others, those covered in dust, apparently know more but are not sharing information. Today there are no card games, no alcoholic beverages and no idle banter. Once moving, I do over hear some quiet conversations, but still am not able to fully piece together the events of the day.

When I finally park my car and walk into our home, I am relieved to see my wife. It is at home, in front of our television that I finally learn the chronology of the day's events. I start to wonder about some of my friends who work downtown. Are they safe? I cannot remember anyone close to us who actually worked in the World Trade Towers. I flash back to the early 1990's when I did consulting work for the Port of New York Authority. Three days per week, I commuted downtown to my cubicle on the 72^nd floor of the North Tower. I wonder if any of my old coworkers from that time were still working in the tower – most likely. I try to remember names and faces and in the following weeks I check the New York Times for names of victims. Fortunately, I do not see any name I know.

September 11, 2001 is a day of infamy. Let all who perished, rest in peace. And may all who lost loved ones, find peace in their hearts.

A Beacon at the End of the Tunnel

In my last posting I was lamenting the one train trip I had made to Beacon, New York due to a longer than necessary "power nap" on my Metro North commutation. That was not my only trip to Beacon by train. I made one a few months earlier while wide awake. I just sat in my seat with my eyes wide open as the train sailed right by the Cortlandt station (my home station and desired stop), the Peekskill station (boyhood home of George Pataki the former mayor of Peekskill and governor of New York), the Garrison station (lovely little town with a great view of West Point and current home of George Pataki) and the Cold Springs station (antiquing capital of the lower Hudson Valley). This rail excursion, Cortlandt to Beacon is only about thirty-five minutes, but it was thirty-five minutes I did not have this particular day.

My wife had bought me two tickets to The Greater New York Wine and Food Festival for Valentine's Day. This is a three day gala with gourmet food, cooking exhibitions, wine tastings, food tastings, cigar tastings, and tasting tastings. Click on the link above to get the scope on the event. It was to be held at the Double Tree Hotel in Tarrytown and we were staying there for the entire weekend since we figured driving was out of the question! The gala started at 7 PM on Friday evening and meant I needed to catch an earlier train home in order to make this sold out opening event. I cut my walk to Grand Central Station a little too close and barely had time to look at the monitor with the train schedule and get on the train. I had two minutes to catch the train to Poughkeepsie but little did I know the first stop on this train was Beacon! I was into my "power nap" before 125^th Street and apparently did not even know this train stopped at this station. Somewhere before Spuyten Duyvil the conductor came to collect tickets and informed me that the train would not stop at Cortlandt station. "Can I get off at Croton Harmon," I asked knowing this was a ten minute taxi ride to my home? "No, but you could have gotten off at 125^th Street." Well that was a bit of useful information I would never get to use! I asked for a schedule so I could assess the damages to my plans and see when I would be able to catch a southbound train back from Beacon to Cortlandt. This train gets to Beacon at 6:16 PM and the southbound train leaves at 6:45 PM and gets to Cortlandt at 7:12 PM. My wife expects me at the house at 6:00 PM.

My keen engineering trained mind kicks in. I have a schedule, a calculator on my Blackberry and much too much time to figure out that I am most likely going to be late. But how late will I be? What ETA do I give to my understanding wife and our friends who were also spending the weekend at the festival? Great idea number one: I will recommend that Fran get a ride with Peggy and Tom and I will meet them all there at the event a little late – like an hour and half late. That did not sound so bad. I give a call home and lay out option one. It actually takes a few minutes before getting to explaining option one. There is a short discussion (monologue) centered on how a college educated man with over twenty-five years (5,000 round trips) of commuting experience could board the wrong train. I begin to sense ill will in the call. I interrupt these points of wisdom and present option one to help save what little self esteem I am able to hold onto. Lo and behold, Peggy and Tom are already on their way to the Festival and had left from White Plains. Silence at my end of the call. [Note to self: never present an option one, if you do not already have an option two.] "What time will you be here?" zip,zip,dash,dash – sounds of my mind racing. The return train gets in at 7:12 PM and it is another fifteen minutes to get to the car and drive home; that makes it about 7:30 PM. "I'll be there at 7:00 PM," and the call ended.

What was I thinking? During my zip,zip,dash,dash experience the demon of best possible scenarios overtook my brain. The train to Beacon gets in at 6:16 PM, there most likely will be a taxi at the station (big assumption number one), the drive back to the Cortlandt station is no more than twenty minutes (big assumption number two) and 7:00 PM is better than 7:30 PM (that is axiomatic, all other things being equal). So my little demon has set me up for being late twice for the same incident. But I am the eternal optimist. What could go wrong?

Big assumption number one, was a good assumption. There was a cab at the station. Little wrinkle number one, I was not the only person looking for a ride. So in we go – the Pondit wanting to get back to my car in Cortlandt in twenty minutes, and passenger two sitting next to me who I find out is going to the state prison just outside of Beacon. Ten minutes in the cab listening to the banter between passenger number two and the driver (still not sure if passenger two works at the prison, is visiting the prison or is surrendering for incarceration). All we have done thus far is travel away from Cortlandt. It is now 6:35 PM. I could have stayed on the station platform and the southbound train would be arriving in ten minutes!

Finally the cabbie and I are heading south. I am in no mood for idle talk, but the cabbie wants to chat. Chat we do. At 7:10 PM we pull into the station parking lot. Fortunately I have seventy dollars with me. The fare is fifty dollars and with tip, I now have less than ten dollars in my pocket. This was one of those "all other things being equal" not being equal. I had a cab ride I did not cherish, including sharing the ride with a possible mass murderer (or worse, passenger number two looked a bit like Bayou investment charlatan, Sam Israel), and I spent sixty dollars which gained me two minutes on the trip home.

Getting home I changed clothes in record time, finished last minute packing, had to make sure my wife had some cash with her and off we headed for Tarrytown. We had a wonderful weekend. The Friday night event was over subscribed, arriving late was almost a blessing. As Billy S. wrote, "All's Well that Ends Well."

Riding the Rails

In 1977 our family was faced with a dilemma, we needed to relocate from Dorado, Puerto Rico to the New York City area. That meant trying to decide to live in the city, in Westchester, in western Connecticut, Long Island or northern New Jersey and to do this with one or two "house hunting" visits. Oy vey iz mir! We immediately ruled out the city and reasoned that Long Island with its seven million people and only seven bridges and two tunnels connecting it to the mainland by automobile was too stifling. My new job was in midtown Manhattan only two blocks from Grand Central Terminal. This made both Westchester and Connecticut more attractive than a bus and subway trip from New Jersey.

I wanted to have a train commute of less than one hour. That limited where in Westchester or Connecticut we could live. All of our children's grandparents lived about twenty miles west of Kingston, NY in the Catskill Mountains. That made Westchester more attractive than Connecticut. We decided on Northern Westchester and ended up in Croton-on Hudson. In retrospect we are very pleased we made this choice.

Like the hobo and his rucksack or a swagman with his swag, there was I with my briefcase and suit waiting for the 7:43 AM Conrail train to New York City's Grand Central Terminal. It was not a bad experience. This train originated at the Croton Harmon station and only made a couple of stops each morning. There was always a seat for me and I could sit anywhere on the train I wished, theoretically. I soon found myself boarding the same train car each morning and when I took the time to look up from the New York Times, I was sitting near the same group of people each and every morning. It is almost like we all had assigned seats. Now sitting near the same people did not mean you actually spoke to these people. People are weird – commuters are more so. I would spend time fantasizing where does he work or what does she do for a living? Yet the idea of initiating an introduction never crossed my mind. Coming home I usually caught the same train each day and, yes, usually sat in the same car, but had more trouble getting the exact same seat each night. Alas.

Now there was socializing on the trains. Some trains had a bar car, where regulars would congregate to smoke, drink and unwind from their business days. Eventually, this service was discontinued on the Hudson line that I took to the Croton Harmon station. Within in a few years, maybe after 1,200 train rides, I found myself joining a regular card game on the train. Three, four or five of us would sit in triple seats tilted so we were knee to knee and play hearts to and from work. I am sure our bantering and loud play were an interruption to many, but for me and my train friends, it made the commute a new found pleasure. Now day to day different players joined the game, but there was always Jack in his suit, bowtie and handlebar mustache on the train early to claim our seat. He removed one of the advertising posters that were in each train car which we all balanced on our knees for a card table. I played in this game for over seven years – that is a possibility of 2,800 games of hearts. We never played for a penny but were as competitive in our play as if there were hundreds of dollars at stake. Eventually, I stopped commuting for a few years and can honestly say I missed the game and the companionship. As fate would have it, one of the regular players, Bill, is now living in our community on the shores of Dickerson Pond.

In 1999 I reentered the commutation world. It was now Metro North and not Conrail and the trains were actually a lot better than they were in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I did not find a card game, but rediscovered the New York Times. I was still commuting from Croton Harmon so I had forty-seven minutes to "do" the Times. Each morning I quickly scan each section. I check the sports stories and actually read the sports section on football Mondays. If I see an article in the business section, I might read it quickly. Next on Tuesday through Friday, I open the Arts section and start the crossword puzzle. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I finish the puzzle then look again at the Metro section and next read the editorial pages. If I have time I look at the national news section. I save the Tuesday Science section for the ride home. Friday I usually need a part of the ride home to finish the crossword puzzle.

In 2000 we moved a little north and I still commuted from the Croton Harmon station until the predatory Village of Croton-on-Hudson parking rules and enforcement caused me to change to the new Cortlandt Station. I now had fifty-eight minutes on the train and could spend a few more minutes with the Times each morning. Now these past few years I learned to power nap on the ride home. For me a power nap is passing out and falling asleep while the train is still in the Park Avenue tunnel. Napping on the trip to Croton Harmon is fairly safe IF Croton Harmon is the last stop for the train. I was conditioned to wake up in Ossining, but sometimes I needed a helpful nudge in Croton Harmon to remind me to exit the train. There is a much greater challenge napping to the Cortlandt station since those trains go all the way to Poughkeepsie. I had a perfect record going into my last week of commuting. Then one evening, it was a beautiful evening, I woke up somewhere between Cold Springs and Beacon. Twenty-five years of commuting, two hundred trips home each of those years makes five thousand trips and I miss a perfect record the last week on the train. Oh well, the Beacon station is a very nice station.