A Stretch, But Good Writing I Think

new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/22Rgen.html

By ANTHONY DePALMA
Published: June 22, 2008
I’M no Einstein, and my last attempt at studying physics back in high school was an out-and-out C-minus disaster. But recently, and unexpectedly, I had a flash of understanding not only about time and space, but also about past and future, about boys and men and ties and trains. And it has changed the frame of my life.
It was my own version of Einstein’s classic train scenario. Stay with me here — I’m talking about his famous mind experiment that proved how time can be relative depending on the observer. Einstein’s epiphany revolved around the speed of light, principles of physics, and lightning simultaneously striking the front and rear of a moving train. Mine revolved around my sons.
For much of the past year, my first-born son, Aahren, worked at a big law firm in Midtown Manhattan a few blocks from my office at Times Square. He is a just-minted lawyer, fresh out of law school, and it was his very first professional job. That put us on the same Midtown Direct train from Montclair, N.J., some mornings and most evenings.
A few months ago, my younger son, Andrés, took a job as a paralegal at Aahren’s law firm before beginning medical school this summer. That meant there suddenly were enough DePalmas on the train to fill one of New Jersey Transit’s dreaded three-across seats by ourselves.
Pretty quickly a routine emerged. The boys would call me when they were leaving their office and we’d meet on the corner of my building, trying to see how close we could come to arriving at precisely the same moment. From there we’d do some fancy broken-field running down Eighth Avenue to get to Penn Station in time to find seats together on the train for the ride home.
I soon noticed that on the train, time became malleable, and we slipped back and forth from past to present, present to future, as we scooted under the Hudson and then emerged from the blackness into the sodden wilderness of the Jersey meadowlands.
At one and the same time we were father, sons and three professional men. From one angle they were the boys they once were; from another the handsome, strong men they had become. For years I provided everything for them; now we were equals, each of us with our ties and jackets, our own reading material or iPod, sitting with the other commuters, but in a role unlike any of the others’.
Time became a commodity on the 6:40, and the train offered me the rare opportunity to recapture some of the lost moments I thought were gone forever. There had been so many days that I missed being with them because of my work, but now, briefly, it was my work, and theirs, that held out a reprieve.
They became boys again, joking, mocking each other the way brothers do to get a laugh out of each other, and me too. Yet we sometimes talked about their work, and I was amazed at the mounting responsibilities they were taking on and the skills they had acquired when it seemed like such a short time ago I was tying towels around their shoulders because they wanted to fly like Superman.
Given the reality of our complex contemporary lives, I knew that this was probably as close as we would ever get to working together. Both boys have chosen careers far different from my own, just as I veered far from my own father’s hard life as a longshoreman in Hoboken.
I never even got to see my father work — the old Hudson River piers were cut off from the rest of Hoboken by an iron gate, and the ships themselves were hidden behind a long brick warehouse. But I can still feel the thrill of asking the guard at the Pier C gate to call him out to get something that my mother had asked me to carry to him. He’d stalk out, husky, thick-booted and red-faced, wrapped in a stiff woolen coat, and he was different there because he was surrounded by other men who knew him not as Dad but as “Tony all the time,” his nickname on the docks. Being there with him even for that fleeting moment let me briefly into that exotic fraternity.
For me and my boys, the 6:40 became our fraternity. I gladly changed my schedule to meet up with them whenever I could. I found myself wearing a tie more often because I knew they would be wearing theirs. New York City’s vastness melted away temporarily because we knew we were near one another, and we tried to catch lunch together at least once a week.
On days when we hadn’t taken the same morning train, they’d tell me they’d seen my doppelganger on the train, and they’d even take cellphone pictures of the unsuspecting guy who just happened, in their eyes, to look like me. It reminded me of times when they and their sister would pin my photograph on the message board near the kitchen table because I was gone for weeks on a long reporting trip.
Like Einstein’s train, the 6:40 moved through time as it barreled along the tracks. Our past together as a family coexisted with the future to which we were heading. I knew that they could someday be dominated by their work just as I was; that they would struggle to divide their time between career and family, just as I did. Of course, they would have their own families and increasingly be drawn away from me and their mother and sister.
Right from our first trip together, we all understood that this special time would be limited. And it was. As planned, just before Memorial Day Aahren married a wonderful young woman he had met at the University of Notre Dame and moved to St. Louis.
Andrés and I now ride together, and knowing that he starts medical school in a few weeks, I’m often tempted to play hooky with him the way I planned to, but never did, when I used to drop him off at preschool. Amid all these changes, I’ve decided to end my own commute so I can move on to the next stage of my writing career. I’ve timed it so I’ll stop taking the train at just about the same time Andrés does.
Special as these train trips have been to us, we couldn’t just let them end. So on the last day all three of us sat together on the westbound 6:40 New Jersey Transit Midtown Direct, we celebrated the way train veterans do. We picked up our commuter champagne — oil cans of beer in brown paper bags — from a stand in Penn Station that kept them on ice.
The boys paid for their beers, and for mine.
We toasted our pasts, our futures and the sweet small moments of our present.