Life Is a Blur

While at Pennsylvania Station—a.k.a. Penn Station—this past week, it occurred to me that life is a blur. Well, actually, it’s occurred to me before. Nevertheless, I paused and contemplated where I trod—the subway station in this instance and the very locale where my father exited and entered for a quarter of a century on his way to and from work. He toiled at the big post office, as we called it way back when, on 8th Avenue—the one that showcases the famous but unofficial postal motto on its exterior: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. If the stories my father conveyed of life on the job—in the third-class mail division—were any indicators, the postal motto wasn’t quite a motivating force for everyone. But then my father and his postal peers weren’t mail carriers. They were sorters of all sorts of newspapers, magazines, and junk mail.

My dad worked the four-to-midnight shift for most of his years at the big post office. He boarded the Number 1 train in the Bronx for the fifty-or-so minute ride downtown. Unfortunately, his trip coincided with the end of the school day. It was an inauspicious time to be an adult straphanger. Coming home from school—after an unpleasant day on unpleasant transportation—I encountered my father on many occasions dutifully navigating his way to the 231st Street subway station. With a newspaper tucked under his arm and large paper bag—pre-plastic supermarket issue—containing his supper, a piece of fruit, and a beer or two, he never appeared overly thrilled to be going where he was going. The beers, by the way, were against the rules and one could get “written up”—if caught in the act by an unsympathetic supervisor—for the transgression, which my father was at some point. In fact, more than a few of his tales from the job frontier included postal employees who had smuggled in libations and their late-night antics.

Once upon a time I subscribed to both Time magazine and Newsweek. I invariably received them in the mail week after week. Considering that they had to pass through a junk mail division of a post office—with men and women not always one hundred percent dedicated to the task at hand—I was amazed. And so it went. Time and Time magazine passes. Nowadays, there are appreciably fewer pieces of bulk mail wending their way through the U.S.P.S. Who would have thought it possible? Catalogs used to clog our mailboxes. One order from Miles Kimball, L.L. Bean, or Sears would set in motion a mail-order catalog avalanche—a multiplier effect with seemingly no end in sight. But there was an end in sight. Technology saw to that.

I thought about such endings when I entered an uptown Number 1 train on my return trip home. There before me was a passenger perusing the Daily News, which is rather slim these days. Not very long ago in the scheme of things, subway riders reading newspapers was a commonplace sighting. It was the ideal diversion to pass the time. Burying one's head in a newspaper was, too, preferable to making eye contact with the huddled masses. On his way to work, my dad—never fail—left the house with a newspaper. And—when it existed—returned home with a late-night edition of the Daily News called the “Night Owl.” Many a morning in my youth, I sought out the Night Owl—first thing—to see if my favorite team, the New York Mets, had won or lost a game that I was unable to stay up for. The Night Owl rode off into the darkness of night in 1981. Several years after that, my father bid adieu to the gloom of night—his job at the big post office—and retired.

Really, time waits for no man and no woman. My father’s postal employment began in the shadows of Penn Station when it was a magnificent specimen of architecture, although a shadow of what it once was. He was there when the powers-that-be permitted it to be completely demolished and rebuilt—to put it nicely—with none of its original grandeur and charm. What it became in short order—with Madison Square Garden as its crown jewel—was an unsightly and over-crowded mess. Contemporary politicians are trying to rectify the ghastly chaos that is. It won’t be easy and it will be very expensive. Life is a blur and then we die. And—when I accomplish the latter—Penn Station will look different again. Better? Well, that remains to be seen.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)