Long live...

Sitting on the T, my own book in my lap, I used to sneak peeks at what other passengers were reading and write down the titles in the back of my notebook. Across the aisle from me, head down and engrossed, or standing balancing, lurching for the pole whenever turning pages, readers slowly flipped through their paperbacks, their massive hardbounds, their pulps, their graphic novels, their textbooks. I would try to glimpse the spines or the covers to get the names of whatever it was that they were into. Sometimes I had to stare hard if they had reached their stop and were stuffing the volume back into their bags. Did I catch a few words of the title? Could I reconstruct it from what I had? There were school kids working through reading lists, older men with their politics and war books, woman and their Danielle Steeles and Jodi Picoults. Some read classics--which I found most moving. I remember doing once what I had never done--asking a young man what that old dark tattered book he was reading was. Dickens, he told me, from an old collection in his family.

I used to get ten or twenty titles per notebook and I go through notebooks at a rate of one a month. Then it stopped. There weren't so many people reading, then almost none, at least when I rode. Now what I see are phones and blue-flushed faces.  But yesterday, on the 32 bus, as I was reading Phil Klay's Redeployment, I glanced over and saw the young man next to me reading a hardcover book with a title saying something about Thought and Life. Dark clothes, dark skin, fulsome dark hair jutting out of a dark hood, he was reading---Wordsworth! Long live poetry.