This way or that Jan. 12, 2024
I had a choice of ways to take to get to Journal Square
yesterday.
I could have taken the light rail to Exchange Place and then
the Path, or I could have done what I usually do, walk out of JFK Boulevard,
and then walk down to 30th Street to catch the puddle jumper coming out of Manhattan.
There are buses that come all the way up to where I live,
only they run so infrequently, I can’t count on them coming or going.
Still, I chose the second and as I walked down, kept looking
over my shoulder to see if the bus was coming with the possibility of saving
myself many steps, and a long wait at
the bus stop near the old Aldi’s.
When I saw the bus, I was half way between stops. I started
to run to get to the next stop before the bus did.
I waved frantically at the bus as it passed, and I don’t
think the bus driver would have waited for me had not some woman, waiting for a
different bus, flagged her down, allowing me – breathless – to reach the door
before the bus plunged ahead.
This idea of public transportation taking the place of
private cars is ridiculous, even though Hertz rental car this week decided to
embrace the future by investing in electric cars. Hopefully, I won’t need to
rent a car to get to Cape May as I had to do a few times in the past, the
charge might not allow me to reach my destination without stopping, though a
fill up by electric cars means at least an hour stop over, which the whackos
climate change people might tell me was worth it if we want to see the world
from certain destruction. I keep thinking it might be easier to hitch a ride on
a UFO instead.
The driver struggled with traffic as people in pretty much
ordinary cars kept cutting in front of the bus, forcing her to slam on the brakes
as we made our way down the county’s longest road to what was once and will
soon again be the county’s premier shopping district.
The trip ended at the bus depot from where I walked to my
destination as a local school for the swearing in of new Board of Education
members, pausing to buy coffee at the 7-11 and then a set of pens from the
dollar store (most of which did not work when I tried to use them), and then to
a school built in 1968 and appropriately named after Martin Luther King, Jr.
who had been killed that year.
After the several hours, I made my return the same way,
debating again whether to take the PATH to Exchange Place and then the light
rail home or brave the odd schedule of the JFK buses – the rarest of which
would leave me off at my door step, the more frequent puddle jumper at 30th
Street leaving me the long walk the rest of the way.
Again, I chose the second – though after the puddle jumper
dropped me off two of the regular buses passed me within minutes and could have
eliminated the walk entirely.
Fortunately, it was not unbearably cold and the walk allowed
me to stop at the White Castle for four cheese sliders and two small packages
of onion rings (one of my favorite meals – the fries suck after the government
cracked down on trans fats), which I devoured during the rest of the walk home,
passed the elaborate homes (now doctors’ offices) for former local dignitaries,
and a large apartment building on the corner near the street I live on –
strangely unchanged from the 1928 photograph I have in a history of the county
showing these same buildings as if time had stood still (since I live currently
in a house built in 1888.)
Time rarely stands still in this part of the country, where in
the blink of an eye someone is always tearing down old things to replace them
with supposedly better things – Journal Square being the perfect example as new
towers rise in penis envy of Manhattan and the one of two family houses that
once graced the area beyond the shopping vanish whole blocks at a time to make
way for more towers, promising a future that will look nothing like the best,
being sold as better, and perhaps because of how much that part of the planet
has deteriorated, anything new is better than what we got stuck with before.
Only, I don’t like the new we’re being sold as better, it is
just someone else’s vision of the future, at the expense of the past.
Comments
Post a Comment