Chicago Transit Priority
Photo by swanksalot
This essay also appeared in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3, edited by Lee Gutkind
I’ve been a little lazy about getting around town since I bought a hybrid car. When faced with a decision whether to drive or take public transit, too often I opt for the former out of sheer selfishness, rationalizing that since I’m using roughly half the fuel as everyone else, I’m allowed to drive twice as much. But now that gas costs north of $4.00 a gallon, promising only to go higher, that choice is no longer about a squishy, moral obligation to reduce consumption and preserve the planet. It’s starting to get expensive. And since I live in Chicago, a city with an extensive public transit system, I’ve decided to ride the train or the bus whenever possible. I might have been shamed into it because I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth, but I figure that since I already went crazy replacing all the light bulbs in my house with compact fluorescents, it’s the next best thing I can do.
One of my excuses for driving, aside from the electric sound of sanctimony purring from beneath my car’s hood, has always been that I’m usually schlepping around my son Carter. “You can’t expect me to haul a stroller onto that crowded bus, can you?” I planned to say to Al Gore if he accosted me at my regular Shell station one day. “I need a car seat. And room for a diaper bag. And drink holders for his sippy cups. And air conditioning. And an iPod jack plus Bluetooth so I can listen to my podcasts and take phone call hands-free.” Al would slink away at this point, I imagined, muttering, “He’s right, he’s right” in his Tennessee drawl, despondent and ashamed for asking me to sacrifice my baby’s comfort to save the planet.
Now that Carter is big enough to walk and pay for his own fare though, he loves public transit. Love isn’t a strong enough word, actually. When Carter sees the Blue Line train rumbling into our stop, he hops up and down, hooting and clapping his hands like a chimpanzee. It’s Thomas the Tank Engine come to life. “Calm down, calm down,” I say, hoisting him over the six-inch gap between the platform and the train car. “Now go pick a seat that doesn’t smell like pee.”
We’ve ridden the train to Grandma’s house on the north side. We’ve ridden it downtown to buy the good coffee from Intelligentsia. We rode it to a book festival to have his picture taken with Curious George. Mostly, though, we ride the train home from school. Carter’s preschool is about two and a half miles from our house. It’s no more than a 15 minute drive, even with traffic, basically straight north on a major street. My wife drops him off on her way to work, and I pick him up after lunch. Taking the bus there takes at least 30 minutes, depending on how long I have to wait for one to show up, and the train can take up to 45 minutes, including a transfer.
It’s all a hassle, frankly, and all talk of environmental and budgetary concern is just altruistic bullshit. I doubt even Al Gore would disapprove of a 15-minute drive in a hybrid. But it’s bigger than saving a few bucks on gas. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I trudge down to the nearest stop, a half hour before I’d need to leave if I were driving my nice, efficient car, because riding the train home from school is the biggest event of my son’s day. I don’t have the heart to deny him that joy, or myself the privilege of witnessing it.
***
When you ride the train with a kid, at least one that talks as much as mine does, people seem to feel comfortable talking to you. One of the first times we rode the train, we sat down across the aisle from a middle-aged man who was built like a fireplug, muscular and stocky. He was dressed in slacks with a tight, silky, black t-shirt that showed off his biceps, the way you’d dress for work if you were built like that.
He was wearing a wired cellphone earpiece, and kept trying to talk on the phone while we roared through a subway tunnel. He cupped the microphone up to his mouth and and put his finger in his other ear, while I silently mocked him. He caught my eye a couple times and I kept looking away, afraid he was going to call me out for staring at him. Then he pointed to Carter and said, “Excuse me. Does he spend a lot of time with his daddy?”
“I’m his dad,” I said, wondering who else he thought I might be. A brother? An uncle? A male-nanny (manny)?
“Oh, you’re his daddy? Wow,” he said. “That’s so good to see a boy spending time with his father. We have a whole generation of boys being raised by women.”
I glossed over my situation for him, saying I worked from home and picked him up from school, leaving out the part about how my “work” nets roughly enough per year to buy a nice couch. When he got off a few stops later, he smiled, shook my hand, and said, “God bless you, man.”
I sat there and felt downright saintly. Not only was I saving the environment and our family’s finances by riding the train, I was saving my son from being coddled by a bunch of women. Instead, he’ll grow up to be manly, independent, and strong enough to find a woman to coddle him later in life like I did.
***
Carter and I have been commuting home from school this way long enough now that he has a routine. I carry him on my shoulders to the station, he scoots under the turnstile while I pay, and hops down the stairs to the platform. When we get on the train, we circle like a dog deciding where to sleep before we pick a suitable seat, then he squats on his knees to look out the window.
One time we sat across from a woman with her legs stretched across two seats, looking quite comfortable. “He loves to ride the train, does he?” she asked, indicating Carter.
“It’s his favorite,” I said.
“Really? Ooh, I’m scared of the train,” she said, stretching out a little more in her makeshift business class cabin. She was wearing a white tank top pulled up to reveal a potbelly, and had the name “Nene” tattooed down her left bicep in blocky, navy blue letters. She continued to ask the standard questions about Carter’s age, if he goes to school, etc, while he clung to my arm and shielded his eyes. I wished I could do the same.
Nene was quiet for a few minutes, then got up and shoved a pair of half-unwrapped Dum-Dum suckers into his face and said, “Here baby, you want a sucker?” Carter finally lit up and reached out his hand, but I intercepted them and told her, “We’ll save these for his dessert after lunch.” This pleased Nene, and she left us alone the rest of the ride, stopping to say goodbye as she rubbed her belly and got off at her stop.
When Carter and I finally got off, I immediately threw away the suckers and launched into the “Don’t take candy from strangers” lecture. He seemed to buy into it, except for the part about why I had just taken candy from a stranger myself.
“You know that lady, that’s why you took the suckers?” he asked.
“No, but I was just trying to be nice to her. It was easier than saying no,” I said.
“But if you give me the suckers, it’s okay now?”
“No, because they came from that lady first, and we don’t know her.”
He was quiet as we walked the rest of the way up the ramp to street level. Once we were outside the station, he asked, “Can I have some candy when we get home?”
“Sure,” I said, and lifted him onto my shoulders for the walk home.
