Modern Times

They're changing them on me. Slowly but inevitably, soon they will all be the same. It's 1984 on a NY scale, or maybe it's just me being dramatic. Maybe both.

Fine, I won't get ahead of myself, but it's already happening. Since November I've been a regular on the F train, the tried and true line of most of yuppie/hispter central Brooklyn, the blue blooded transport of the south eastern part of the borough. And so in these few months I have become invested in my train. In the mornings I see the same people getting through the same books, the same women in their late 20s and early 30s stroking their ring-less hands anxiously, the same young parents explaining inconsequential details to their children.

And then there's the voice, the reverberating of the conductor's explanations - transfer options, train traffic ahead, the need to stand clear of the closing doors. I have come to recognize two very distinct ones depending on what particular morning train I happen to catch. One is of an older gentleman, probably in his 50s, a heavy NY accent. He's definitely a local, and while he often sounds lazy, tired, bored, behind that superficial aspect of his tone, I hear a love, a passion he has for his City, for his work. His voice is an answer to every doubt I have ever had about whether this is the City for me. When I hear him, I can't imagine belonging anywhere else.

The other voice isof a younger man, clean-cut and precise. He's soft in the way he speaks, polite and considerate. During the winter, when the doors being open for even a second too long meant we'd all freeze, he'd apologize to everybody for it. Faced with the opportunity to transfer to the G from 3 consecutive stations, he'd consistently suggest that interested parties wait to transfer at a station that was underground rather than above, to avoid having to stand out in the cold.

And those trains that they run, there are two consistent types. Sometimes its the parallel rowed one with the grey seats. Otherwise its the old school lego block train with the interlocked seats, red and orange and yellow, stacked atop one another so that if you sit in the double seat the juts out into the middle, your knees touch the knees of the person sitting perpendicular to you.

Its the kind of thing you can't stand or don't care for until it's gone. And now, for the last few weeks, all I see are the new trains, the ones that have been running on the 6 line for over a year, and the more updated version which has been speeding towards Astoria for a few months now. It's all blue benches and steel, not enough to call it "sterile" but significantly devoid of grit in the way I think of NY. That part I'm actually OK with, but it's the voices too that have vanished. Replacing the sounds of the conductors I've come to know are the robotic voices of some unnamed woman and man who just don't really seem to give a shit about me in the way it seemed my human conductors did. And now they're everywhere, the stock voices on all the new trains. They still relay the same information, but there's just no humanity to any of it, there's no character to the particular train that I'm in. I'm just a thing being launched from one borough to another now, a number in a machine, not a NYer who is always running late and never seems to have enough time for everything he needs to do.

I wonder if I'll ever see my conductors again, or if I might just hear them once more at some point, a whisper coming from the edge of a platform on some late night drunken wait for the train that I'll recognize as what NY used to be.