On the 6-train in the mid 1990’s a couple, a man and a woman, entered the train car asking for change. They were married, I noticed their wedding rings. They claimed to have been hoping to make enough money for an SRO (Single Room Occupancy). Actually, only the woman spoke. She led him through the train car. They both carried plastic bags, layered by more plastic bags. Their faces had hints of dirt and their finger nails were dirty. She announced that they both had HIV. The train car shifts and stalls in a tunnel. She is apologetic. She stretched out a dark knitted cap to solicit money. He is silent and follows her. I see them on the 6-train my entire high school career, 1993-1997. A decade later I am on the 6-train, not having thought of or seen the couple. Then she entered. Only she entered. She is soliciting money for an SRO. She is wearing clean clothes and has make-up on, red lipstick. But she is still homely. She carries plastics bags, layered by more plastic bags. Her finger nails are clean. She is wearing her wedding ring. But her silent husband is not following her. I’m half expecting him to enter. She announces that she is HIV positive, and her husband has died of AIDS. I wonder how many people on the train remembered him.
I met Dale during the days when she slept in the waiting room of the women’s shelter waiting and hoping for a bed. She was small in stature, with graying hair. Her eyes were bold and she wore a touch of make-up. She seemed somewhere in her 50’s. In a short period of time I came to learn that Dale had once been a magazine editor, with an expense account, and a top floor office. In time her drinking and drugging landed her without a job, a home, friends, or an identity. As she waited for a bed at the shelter, sleeping in the waiting room for weeks she made efforts to get clean and sober. In less than six months she was able to get clean and sober, and to go through the shelter system into an SRO; a room of her own. We didn’t speak much and she limited doses of her story. I enjoyed seeing her smile. She had very white teeth. Six months or so passed, I hadn’t seen her. I learned that she began drinking again. Shortly thereafter, she had a heart attack and did not survive.
I first encountered the elderly woman at the 7-train platform at Grand Central station whom I referred to her as Granny at Grand Central in the early 1990’s. Even then, she seemed as though she’d always been old. But it wasn’t the kind of old that a child fears of becoming. She was the kind of old where her cheeks were blushed and her skin was flawless in its folds. She sat the bottom of the steps; a brave woman, who seemed unmoved by the waves of Queens-anites walking down the ramp and chasing their train. What I found interesting was that in the times I had seen her, usually in the winters; from 1993-2004, I had not seen her outright panhandle. She had one cane to her left, between the staircase railing and herself and a paper cup to her right, on the step. Passer Byers placed bills and change into it, and although she would take the bills, fold them, and place it in her left breast, I never once witnessed her outright ask for money. I had never seen her arrive or depart, she was always just there, part of the station, unmoved, difficult not to notice, but easily ignored.
