5:10PM & RE-COUNTING

By GrayFoxDown

The notable and remarkable, ten minutes past the work whistle, moment of 5:10pm was a scene of empty desks and unfinished workloads in my office of ten minutes going on ten years ago.  Routine 9-to-5 days that were in full gear by 10, in low gear by 2, and in neutral (bordering on parked) by 4, would suddenly and magically shift to warp drive at 5; in ten minutes time, employees artfully vanished down elevators and through streets and finally into cars, buses and subways toward their distant and respective anonymity.

Now that I’m self-employed, conducting business and concocting minor magic of my own, the famed 9-to-5 hours and minutes have ticked-tocked and timed-out into custom-made hours and custom-styled calendars. I no longer file down, adrift on a swelled sea of frenzied and harried desperation, to the Cortlandt Street station where the 5:10 R train would (hopefully) arrive, its doors opening and closing on me with its mundane ding-dong sound.

Going through the motions of looking for the impossibility of an empty seat, I would automatically stand by the door and (after years of practice) urbanely balance myself to the rhythm of the train’s teeter-tottering motion, opening up my copy of the New York Times to complete my illusion of suaveness.

“Watch the closing doors,”  would emerge from the  P.A. system, while all watched the anticipative closing doors until they closed, and all were jolted away to the Rector Street and the Whitehall Street stations and beneath the East River and into Brooklyn to the Court Street Station and so on.  While all rocked and rolled to the train’s erratic tango , I would glance up from the Times and try to locate a girl who seemed to be always on this train and in this particular car.

Through a tangled congestion of lurching forms and strap-hanger arms, I searched for HER, my “Beatrice of the Subway” and found her sitting between a dapper-looking businessman and a distraught-looking old man. Poised and refined in her customary dress of casual tops, enticing skirts and coquettish  pumps, she was nonchalantly and forever reading  Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” a novel I too had labored on since my college days. There I stood, clad in my three-piece drudgery, gazing at this long cool woman with her wavy brown hair and dazzling blue eyes, who would exit the train at Court Street and leave me again to my fantasies.

The clock of imagination facing reality is holding at 5:10pm, as I count and recount some of the time and images of this summer’s day that were borne of years gone past. Through my Brooklyn apartment window, glimpses and snatches of the New York City skyline are visible through the scattered crevices that lie between trees and buildings that extend to the East River, connected by a winding maze of traffic-scurried street and roads. A merrily jingling Mister Softee truck pulls over to the curb beneath me and sells ice cream to a group of kids, then quickly rejoins a resigned bumper-to-bumper caravan of cars and trucks and buses.

The days are longer in a city where days (like mine) are invariably heedless of daylight and moonlight, practicing and maintaining a wider and freer scope of commerce and trade. I no longer commute to work, but am one of those lucky “computer age” people who work out of their homes; the city I had basically known from the confines of  9-to-5 hours for so many years, now a drafting board for ideas that can be fully explored and appreciated.

Notwithstanding, it’s 5:10pm, give or take a few hours or months or years,  a hot afternoon and my wife Steffie is calling me to join her for a cold shower…which, with her, is ultimately hot. She was none other than the “Beatrice” of my desires on the train whose carefully concealed insecurity over her future, together with my carelessly apparent despair over my past, eventually led to our merging into a mutually anxiety-laden present, while in transit aboard the 5:10 R train.

Now and then, it’s marvelous to have someone or something to provide a point of reference for one’s precarious yet customized, all-encompassing day and prevent our getting lost in the allure of illusive freedom. If anything, we finally finished “Remembrance of Things Past”…now it’s on to reading it in the original French, which we’ll embark on at 5:10pm, somewhere in the present or future and in remembrance of things past.