Labor Day weekend and I was standing on the platform of the train station in Ronkonkoma, a box of cinnabons in my hand as I looked up and down the tracks. Halfway between Brooklyn and Greenport, I was heading to the vacation home of friends Kelly and Kevin. A group of seven were already there, me and two unknown others taking the train from NYC.
The day before I compared the schedules of the Long Island Rail Road and the Hampton Jitney buslines. The bus looked complicated. It had multiple points of departure in Manhattan and multiple drop points on Long Island. The train, with one departure in the morning and one in the afternoon, seemed the easier choice: Go to Penn Station, buy ticket, get on train, read magazine, transfer trains in Ronkonkoma, arrive in Greenport. A simple series of steps for a relaxing weekend.
And so, in Ronkonkoma, I waited for my next train. And waited. The station was not large. Two tracks, one heading into the city, the other out to the North Fork. A train sat on the westbound track under a sign announcing it’s departure for Manhattan in 20 minutes. The eastbound track was empty. I climbed the stairs to the walkway straddling the tracks and went into the staion house. The schedule hanging on the wall informed me that the train for Greenport had left (without me) and I would have to wait 5 hours for the next one.
Cursed weekend schedules.
A quick phone call to Luswin that was passed off to Kelly, I had to answer the damning question ‘how?’ “I don’t know,” I said. ”I got off the train and then I didn’t see another one.” Her other friends, brothers visiting from Indiana, managed to find the train.
I sat down on a bench and contemplated the train heading back into the city and the taxi dispatcher sitting in his office, stubbing out a cigarette as he gleefully eyed me. I was his prey, the fool who couldn’t maneuver through a two tracked train station.
I opened the box of cinnabons and ate one. ‘If I head back home I can get my laundry done, move the shelves, help Marcos organize his comic books, catch up with Turtle, go shoe shopping.’ I picked up another cinnabon (they were minis). ‘Or,’ I thought, ‘if I pay for a cab the rest of the way I can endure being teased for the rest of the weekend, eat and drink too much, play with the dogs, and sleep in the next day.’
Two weekends prior, I had been in Ohio for my niece’s baptism. It was a quick trip, into Columbus on Friday, meet my niece, borrow a friend’s car to drive up to the island, catch up with family, drive back to Columbus, baptize the baby, play with my nephews, fly back to New York.
Going home only once a year, you see the toll of the seasons. My father has a new cell phone he doesn’t know how to use. “Can you send text messages?” I asked him. “Huh?” he responded, cocking his head to a degree, his mouth open and eyes squinted behind dark glasses. “Well, I don’t know.” My mother sat in a recliner, her broken leg elevated. She’d been in a car accident travelling with a cousin between the wedding and reception of another cousin. “Are you guys talking about me?” she asked, her pitch hurt. “No!” my impatient sister called across the room. She’d been taking care of Mom for almost a month and had had her fill. “We were discussing an episode of the Jeffersons!” “Well, I think you’re talking about me,” Mom muttered as she fidgeted in her seat and prison.
A week before that I had decided that I would no longer call home while walking down 8th Avenue. Traffic noises, my hesitation to be one of those people who yell into cell phones, and my mom’s aging eardrums made the conversations experiments in repetition.
On Sunday, after the baptism, my sister asked me a question that I didn’t fully hear. “Huh?” I asked, cocking my head to a degree and my mouth open, eyes squinted. She burst into laughter. “You look just like Dad!” “Are you talking about me?!” I was horrified. In the matter of a weekend I’d become not one, but both of my parents.
Back in Ronkonkoma, I contemplated the cinnabons. ‘If I go home,’ I reasoned, ‘I’ll have to eat the whole box anyway.’ I started a third. And decided to shell out the money for the cab to Riverhead, where hopefully someone would be willing to drive the hour each way to retrieve me.
