Riding Metro North. With Curious Dog.

~ Live & Learn


5:40 am train.
Metro North south to Grand Central.
Need to buy a ticket.
I look down the long platform. Four minutes to scheduled arrival. Gotta go.

He’s 25 yards up.
His right foot is lame. His gait is slow. Handicapped.
I close in on him.
He’s in his late teens.
Baseball cap.
Backpack slung over his right shoulder.

He stops and turns to stare at the billboard.
His chest is rising up and down – giggling.
It’s an ad for a Broadway play based on the 2003 best selling novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”
I remember the book. And smile.
I take one last look as I pass him. His head leans on his right shoulder as he takes in the poster, playing back chapter by chapter.

I buy my ticket. The train approaches and I look for him. He’s the last to get on, the conductor urges him in.

Metro North pulls into Grand Central. I exit onto 42nd street. Weather app says 73F: “Feels like 75F.” No. Feels like a bloody Rainforest.

Cab. Cab. Cab. Cab.  Yet some source, some power, is pulling me to walk. The Curious Dog influence.

I walk.

Morning in Manhattan.

Man eating hot dog, at 6:45 am.  Suit walking a Snow White (Snow White) Samoyed down 5th avenue. (Did she just smile at me?) Skateboarder riding down the center line of 42nd street, his right foot a piston, propelling him forward.  Messenger wearing a SuperMan T-shirt races past him on bike.  Tourists dragging luggage. Building attendants hosing down streets.  A Bohemian musician playing his Sax.  And finally, a sparrow, so delicate, so tiny, it could fit into the palm of my hand with room to spare – there she stands fearlessly on the sidewalk amidst giants, pecking at food morsels.

It’s him. He’s done it. Curious Dog. He’s pulled me here. Seeing what I don’t see. Feeling what I don’t feel. Sweeping me off my well trodden path.

Who’s the luckier man?

Notes:

  • Inspired by Julia Kristeva from “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Adjection”: “…there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think. The ‘sublime’ object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.” (Thank you The Value of Soul Making)
  • Photo: Curiousonbroadway.com
  • Related Posts: Commuting

 

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