The Lady on the Subway

I’ve read about the 60s and 70s in New York.  In New York: Then and Now, I’ve read about how performing arts houses were built in the 60s across from the Lincoln Center, I have read how the Vanderbilt Hotel was turned into an apartment building in 1965, and that in 1974 the Times Tower became the Expo America Tower.  Don’t get me wrong, I love learning about the locations and the history, but today I got a New York Then and Now lesson on the subway that changed my life.

I was on the subway coming home from work when an old lady with a walker got on the train.  A man got up to let her sit down, and while sitting her walker got stuck on the pole in the middle of the train people use to hold on to.  I helped her get it loose then I sat down next to her. She told me she liked my necklace. I thanked her telling her my mom shipped it to me recently.

“Well, now you get to tell your mother than a random stranger on the train complimented your necklace, it’s not every day a random stranger talks to you in New York,” she smiled at me. I looked at her and took out my headphones as she continued, “I was born here, and raised here, looks like I’ll spend my whole life here.” And that is how one of the best conversations of my life began.

Her mother moved to New York City in 1948 from Puerto Rico.  She had one friend living there who helped her get a job and a place to stay. Within a year she was married and had a newborn child, the 64-year-old woman I had the pleasure of meeting.  Every six months her mother helped move one of her family members to New York.  She said they would live with them until they got on their feet, and the moment one moved out, the next would move in.  Before long she said her family was occupying an entire apartment building.

She said growing up during this time was amazing.  She said rather than gangs “beating up a guy if they dated out of their race,” it was quite peaceful. (Not that I found violent race allegiance peaceful.) I tried to keep it light and asked her if it was like West Side Story, “Exactly like West Side Story Honey! That might as well have been a true story,” she laughed. 

Her face lit up as she talked about the music of her youth and witnessing all of it in New York.  “The Jazz, oh it was kicking!” she exclaimed.  She said any restaurant in her area you entered had live Hispanic music, and ‘oh how she loved to dance!’   She told me about the grates that passed through New York, “We had the Beatles, we had Bob Dylan, we had The Stones! Those were the days.”

Then her face got serious and she said, “Those were also the days when women were finally being able to be women, or more like people rather.” She told me that her mother was the first Puerto Rican woman in that area to get divorced and that it caused an outrage.  She told me how her best friend growing up’s father was a preacher, and that when she grew up she also married a preacher.  Her friend’s new husband beat her, and when she told her father he told her to go home to her husband, because he owned her now.  She said girls her age were rebelling against their family, that her and her friends wanted to be “real women,” and they were vocalizing it for the first time. 

Towards the end of our ride, I asked if she had ever lived outside of the city.  She said she lived in Mexico for two years, then Florida for a couple years.  While living in Florida her kidney failed and she went back to New York to get a transplant.  She said even under the circumstances she automatically caught that “Old New York Fever.” She moved back right after her transplant.

My stop came too soon, I felt like the lady in Forrest Gump who misses her buss to hear more of Forrest’s story, but sadly I did get off at my stop.  When I was putting my purse over my shoulder she looked at me and said, “Now I always tell my kids, always do what you love, because simply existing, is not living.”

I thanked her shyly with my smile and got off the train as quickly as I can because when I stepped out, I started to cry. I felt like I was walking out of a movie. Conversations like that…don’t just happen, do they? I don’t know her name, or where she will go in life after she got off the train at 125^th this evening, but I hope she has an amazing life, because she truly touched mine.