reading between the lines

An "overheight" truck shut down the New York City Port Authority bus terminal at rush hour today. By the time I arrived at Port Authority - where I was boarding a bus to New Jersey to have dinner with relatives - things had been shut down for maybe 45 minutes.

Now, most of you have probably never had the pleasure of navigating that bus station, so let me tell you, it is something to behold. Willy Wonka could not have dreamed up a more chaotic-yet-efficient structure for getting a whole lotta suburbanite salarymen (and women) in one door and out the other as quickly as possible.

(Now, I freely admit that I actually take a bus from Port Authority about once every three months, so it's possible that regulars would scoff at this description, whether for misguided praise or misplaced modifiers or whatever. Luckily, I don't think any "real" New Yorkers - or New Jersey suburbanites, for that matter - are reading this blog.)

Anyway, I've always been fascinated by the building itself, how from the outside you can always see a constant stream of buses in circuitous descent of the many levels, and how the inside seems constantly stuck on fast-forward as commuters zip around to their various bus gates, always knowing where to go despite the dizzying number of options and total lack of signage.

But today the zipping ended in surprised halting and amazement at the lines snaking everywhere around the huge terminal building. I cut through three arms of what I realized was all the same line in order to get to the ticket machine, and chatted with several women near the head of the line who assured me (luckily, correctly) that the delays looked worse than they were. As the loudspeaker droningly assured us that the vertically gifted truck had been cleared and the terminal was now running full schedule, people calmly bought their tickets and tracked the various lines to their ends to join the queue.

And here's the thing: just about everyone was quiet, calm and patient. These are New Yorkers; the whole purpose of living and working in the city (or working here and living in the suburbs) is to rush around self-importantly and hiss at tourists who move through our sidewalks and Starbucks at Iowa speed. These are people who can't stand 10 seconds in lines at airports before they begin to mock the poor TSA officers (who, by the way, could make more money working at McDonalds) for their inefficiency, who yell at their baristas at Starbucks for serving the tourists so-what-if-they-were-here-first-I-have-an-important-conference-call.

Yet here they all stood in twisting, confusing lines, either resisting their petty complaining urges or maybe, just maybe, not even feeling them at all. Just reading their magazines and calling their spouses and sometimes even joking with one another about the incredible backup of thousands of people caused by one idiot truckdriver. There were no death threats, no jeering, no snide remarks. It was fascinating and more than a little heartwarming to look around at the sea of faces, the beautiful melting pot of people from all over the city and all over the world, coming from their thousands of different jobs and daily frustrations, just waiting to go home for the day.

Yes, there are things I will miss.