The heavens released their garden-watering goodness: buckets and streams and swimming pools of rain. I was thrilled to see it for my gardens’ sake but was not one whit happy about it for my own. I had to walk four blocks in this deluge (this was no mere storm), barely protected by a flimsy, half broken umbrella, to reach the Metro that would take me one station up the line, from where I’d walk a block to a waiting bus that would take me to Manhattan, where a subway would take me to the stop only a few blocks from Rider’s house. In a way, I was doing this for him, braving these torrents, getting more soaked by the minute, just to be with him.
I timed my departure from the office to give myself a little, but not too much, leeway before the bus left. After a block of vigorous walking I paused, one quarter wet, under an awning next to the sidewalk. When I had fooled myself into thinking the rain had slowed down a little, I walked another block to a small overhang at a building’s entrance where I waited, now half wet, wondering if the storm would show a little mercy to a poor, increasingly soaked grandpa.
Knowing the bus to Rider would not wait and suspecting the rain wouldn’t change its course in time for me either, I made the final soppy dash two more blocks to the Metro, where I arrived fully three-quarters wet. The jeans I had changed into just fifteen minutes before, not quite dripping, were soaked through, heavy sheaths of clammy denim sticking to my legs. Many of my fellow Metro passengers, umbrella-less in the storm, were dripping, drenching wet. Thank goodness the flimsy umbrella had saved me from a completely soaking wet four-hour ride. I made the bus on time, grateful for its clothes-drying air-conditioning.
Did I say four hour trip? The storm had wreaked havoc on the rush hour traffic. It took us an hour and a half to travel barely 20 miles, hardly away from Washington, to where the traffic finally let up and let us speed to New York, and me, to Rider. Imagine my relief at finally reaching Penn Station, only a half hour or less subway ride to my grandson. Imagine my frustration to wait ten minutes, twenty, thirty, watching train after train zip by, none the ones I wanted. Imagine how my last thimble full of patience evaporated when I found out my train didn’t travel that late at night (it was now after eleven o’clock). A friendly subway driver, possibly himself a grandfather, sensing my grandfatherly angst at being so delayed, told me to ride his train two stops down, get off and take the next train, any train, that came by. I did. It worked.
Over seven hours after I started my trek, almost enough to have driven from Washington to Brooklyn and back again, still a little damp from the storm, I reached Rider. I was also grateful to see his grandmother who had driven there a few days before, and his parents, too. Exhausted as I was, I wasn’t too tired to hold my grands0n. Funny how the long trip’s pains melted away as I looked into his sweet face, his bright, blue eyes. The ride to Rider was worth every pain for this moment. Possibly like a mother who decides to have a second child, having forgotten the travails and difficulty of giving birth to the first, I would board another bus, brave another tempest, hell and high water, thunder and lightning, hail, frost, snow, and re-routed, late-night New York subways, just to be with Rider.
