Part Of The Madding Crowd

When waiting on a subway platform in New York, while the madding crowds slowly barge and bump and bumble their way along to their chosen boarding spot on the expanse of dirty granite pave, take a moment, and try and spot the batteries.

Scattered around, in the filth between the tracks, under the scampering paws of the subway rats, are literally thousands of expired AA batteries. It's a bit weird, but I suppose with the number of personal stereos the subway system has carted around over the years, the used batteries had to go somewhere. Once you see one, you might see its companion (they had to arrive in pairs, right?) and then all the others...like the playing cards in Sex and The City (or so I am reliably informed) only with more grime.
Why not make it a game? The most I've spotted from one place on a platform without moving was twenty three. Just a little thing I've started doing after three days of Queens-Midtown commute.

Tra-la.

Moving to New York was a little odd. It has a very powerful presence; you cannot escape the fact that you are in one of the great cities of the world, and at the same time, the ethnic and socio-economic harlequin that she is, New York is all-encompassing, varied, ever-changing and restless. It is not easy to feel like a part of the city. New York was the first place I experienced in the United States. I arrived as a tourist, I fell in love with a beautiful woman, and I left knowing that I was coming back to stay.
But from the moment I came back; from the moment I touched down at JFK and I made my laborious suitcase-laden way across the airport terminal linoleum clutching my passport with all the immigration papers stuck and stapled inside, I felt like a foreigner.

The feeling of being foreign goes much further than simply having to repeat myself two or three times when ordering coffee at Dunkin' Donuts. (I mean, if in that situation things go really bad I can, at a pinch, switch to schoolboy Spanish. One more for the handbasket express, please.) It's more to do with New York's spinning complexity, and watching it dance on from the sidelines - the vantage point of a resident who has only the meagrest part to play. It's been something that I had almost become accustomed to. Riding the subway into Manhattan from Queens was something I did in the afternoons to meet Krissa outside her building, or to go to the library, or for a walk down Broadway, a linger in the cafe in the Barnes and Noble at Union Square.

This week everything changed with the start of my first real job in the city. I leave home to make work for 9 o'clock, and I finish at half past five. I am jostled on packed subway trains. I am offered a copies of Metro and AM New York. I am tempted by coffee shops between my subway stop and my building, and I am leant a spring in my step from my personal stereo. I know the morning and evening security guards. I know what Midtown looks like from 20 floors up on sunny days and a misty day, and best of all, I know what it feels like to be part of the city.

In a funny way, it's worth working just for that.