Trained flaneur

Women on the A train.

Nobody isn’t opinionated about the New York City subway. It can be crowded cheek-to-armpit miserable if you are short and smushed against a tall rider. The cars can be peppered with manspreading bros and perfumed by funky food or far far worse. In summer, when most station platforms are hellishly hot—only seven out of 472 are air conditioned—they have less charm than a dead rat.

Me, I love the show, and that you can take the train to the ocean, or the zoo, or what comes close to being another country.

And when you get a seat without weird complications, you can ride the rails for hours, a resting flaneur, through 248 miles of color and life, with fashion shows that defy NYC’s all-black clothing edict, amidst a panoply of faces from infant to alta kocker, from near-transparent Nordics to night-black Africans, and a global spectrum between.

If you are lucky, teenage acrobats will put on a show, somersaulting from overhead handholds as passengers assiduously ignore feet whizzing inches from their heads. Or a mariachi band will sing of hope and sorrow. If your luck is really rotten, you will be assailed by a Jesus freak with a penchant for sharing.

I used to enjoy the origami architecture of newspaper reading—that long-fold technique that divided broadsheet pages lengthwise so the reader would not intrude into others’ space. Now newspapers are gone, books are rarities, and phones ubiquitous.

But the silence of screen-mesmerized riders and that strange privacy found within a crowd of strangers make the subway a great place to drift along as worlds parade before eyes and lens.