What I Love About Our NYC Subways, a Baker's Dozen

1. When the number 2 train brakes into the station, it somehow plays out the first few notes of Bernstein's There's a Place for Us. Last week, my wife was surprised when I showed her where Bernstein got it from, a little corner of Beethoven's first piano concerto. I love Clifford Curzon playing it, elegance, pure elegance.

2. At Columbus Circle, go into the station, in there, two of the stairs will show lead you further down to the A, C, B and D trains. You have to get the right stairs (south side as you come off the 1, 2, 3). The signs will say AD and BC with two arrows pointing to the two different tracks. I call it our time machine. One train to the future, one to the dinosaurs.

3. There used to be these lit up design pictures to see as you took the tunnel under the water to Brooklyn from Manhattan.

4. The breathtaking, leave-my-seat view when the trains go over the bridges.

5. There is one stop on the F line where I will always loose my sense of North, South, East, West when I emerge and am certain of the wrong direction.

6. The 1 train Stop mosaics of Alice in Wonderland at 5oth street; and the subdued, abstract mosaics when entering one part of Grand Central's subway station.

7. Meeting a friend by chance on a train, especially when I haven't seen the person in years.

8. Those red and white lamp globes on some entrances contain Pokemon, don't they?

9. The elegant Union Square kiosk.

10. In the snowstorm years ago, riding the F train above ground in Brooklyn. The tracks froze or were covered with snow or something. Everyone was asked to get out
of the train and walk a near-forsaken patch of city in the storm, two stops over to make a connection.

11. On an advertising poster, they showed us how all these new trains were shinny and clean but someone wrote tiny graffiti on the little trains as if he had a tiny, tiny spray can.

12. That this huge world of workers actually exists below us while we sleep.

13. All those books I read while riding.

(This list format is a bit overused on the internet, but it was fun to give a try.)

*photo - tainted dream on flickr. Subway Drummer www.johnsloan.net/