The Elephant and Noah

Meet Noah, the latest addition to the household.

Posted by The Elephant on May 31st, 2008 under Et cetera | Comment now »
The Elephant and the Mean Old Man

After the M60 bus pulled away from the stop outside Columbia’s gates, I settled into my seat toward the front of the cabin. Two rows of three seats face each other on the city buses, while the rest of the seats face forward in rows like the interior of an airplane.

I chose the seat I did because I was carrying two large pieces of luggage, a laptop, and a rolling suitcase. With so much to carry, I did not think I could fit into the normal bus seats and I wanted the extra aisle space in order that I not block other riders from moving toward the bus’s back. I compressed myself and my bags as much as possible into the corner of the seat, leaving about one and a half seats open to my right. The empty space was soon taken by another woman at a later stop.

This arrangement was not a problem as the bus traveled through Harlem and along 125th Street. More riders were getting on the bus at every stop, but I had oriented myself in such a way that no one was blocked from free passage down the center aisle.

Finally, right before we were about to leave Manhattan on our way to LaGuardia, the bus picked up a flood of people, including one older gentleman wearing a fedora and trenchcoat. We were so crowded that many remained standing and braced themselves with the railings and grips, just like on a busy subway car. This older man was among those who remained standing.

The bus pulled away from the stop and had been traveling for a few minutes when I started to notice that this man was grumbling and frowning at me. The muttering grew louder and more enunciated, eventually reaching full dialogue directed at me.

“You got all those bags there, takin’ up all that space. You need to move over.”

I couldn’t. There was no more chair to move over to.

“I’m sorry, sir, this is as far as I can go.”

“No, it’s not! You need to move over!”

“I’m afraid I can’t. There isn’t any more space.”

“It’s because you’ve got all them damn bags blockin’ up everything. Move over!”

What was this man’s problem? I had been as courteous as I thought possible in seating myself the way I did. Bus seats are not that big, and with the bus in motion, any further repositioning was going to be very, very difficult. But this thought-process of maximizing space utilization was apparently too time-consuming for the old man.

“Move over!” he said loudly when I did not immediately comply with his previous complaint. Other passengers were beginning to look at us. With great discomfort and struggle, I managed to compress myself a little more to the left, opening at least two feet of room on the bench.

“I have, now this is as far as I can go,” I replied, flatly. I was shocked by how aggressive this man was being toward me. It was 4:30 in the morning on a Friday – not a time I would consider particularly stressful or pressured. Before the old fart had started complaining, I was drifting in and out of a light sleep.

“You can do better. Get’yo’ bags out of the way! Blockin’ up the aisle and everything. I want to sit down! I’m 62 years old and if I want to sit down, then you damn well better let me!”

He started brushing and tapping at my bags as if threatening to move them himself. I rolled my eyes, and I felt the adrenaline beginning to pump. The confrontation had passed that critical point separating the phase where you hasten to avoid making a public display by diffusing the situation from the phase where you’re just pissed off and you’ll continue to escalate the argument because you’re tired of someone pushing you around.

“Look, there is space next to me. Sit there.”

“That’s not enough! Get’yo’self over! Put your bags under your seat, boy!”

I gave a half-hearted attempt to situate one of my bags under the seat as the old man had said. I was not about to let this man order me around.

“Are you happy? That’s as far as I can go. Now there is space next to me, so if you want to sit, do it.”

“You not listenin’ to me! You shouldn’t even be on the bus. Not with all those bags. Look at that girl!”

He motioned to a girl sitting across the aisle who had a single suitcase. Apparently, she was a model of bus passenger behavior.

“She’s not blockin’ up the whole bus like you!”

“That’s because she has only one piece of luggage.”

“Then you oughtta take a cab!”

“I will, if you pay for it.”

At this reply he became visibly madder, and he started to posture. In my mind, I affirmed to myself that I would engage him physically if he were to try to use bodily force. (This decision was a big step for me, because I am the type of person who resists any resolution involving physicality. I have never punched anyone, been punched, or participated in a fight. I cave before arguments reach the point of fights, but this man was so inexplicably hostile and unreasonable that he managed to flip some switch deep inside me.)

“Who do you think you are? With all your bags and such blockin’ up the aisles? I don’ believe it, you people all comin’ up here to New York thinkin’ you can do whatever you want. Well, you can’t!”

Yes, mister – I enrolled in college here with only the largest, most cumbersome luggage so I could board this exact bus at this time on this day just to tweak you.

“Get off it,” I told him. “Sit down or don’t, sir, but this is the best I can do.”

Why was I still calling him “sir”? Regardless, he turned around and shoved himself onto the row of seats in the gap between me and the next rider, a diminutive Asian woman. He purposely sidled up to me, causing my bags to shift and lose their tenuous arrangement on my lap.

“Stop it, sir,” I firmly said.

“No, you move your bags.”

“Whatever,” I said, sighing loudly as I ignored him.

People were still staring at us, even though the old man had sat down. I couldn’t tell whose side they were on in the argument – I scanned their faces carefully for signs of support as the bus rolled along. About the only things I did see on the other riders’ expressions were their studied attitudes of disinterest. New Yorkers have this skill down pat: a man decked out in a red cape and top hat could walk onto the bus carrying in his arms a small herd of miniature glowing elephants, but the bus riders, being true New Yorkers, would continue staring at their chosen points of focus floating somewhere in the middle distance a few feet in front of them.

The old man was not about to let this confrontation die silently, however. He continued to grumble, block after block.

“People these days, people ain’t got no manners. Ain’t s’posed to ride on a bus with all these bags here. Ain’t s’posed to take up a whole buncha seats just ’cause you don’t wanna move over.”

I grinned, knowing full well who he intended by the generic references to “people these days.” His ramblings were classic, textbook crotchety-old-manisms.

“Here I am, old as I am, and I wanna sit down. S’posed to not take up so much space. Ain’t no proper bus etiquette.”

As he sputtered this last sentence, he leaned his head toward me, presumably making sure that I could hear him. And hear I did, particularly the crisp way he enunciated the last word – “etty-quit.”

I laughed out loud. What else could I have done? He had self-destructed from a commanding stranger into a ridiculous geezer.

The old man gave my bags a couple more annoying nudges to indicate his displeasure, but the bus had stopped. Somewhere now in Jackson Heights, most of the riders were exiting and, in the process, opening up large tracts of new seating. To one of these recently emptied seats my old man haranguer shuffled away.

He did not bother me for the rest of the ride. Although we both got off the bus at the same stop at LaGuardia (and I was worried at the time we might have been looking to catch the same flight), I have no idea where he was headed nor what his purpose was for riding the bus that morning. I’m not sure who won our confrontation, either – he ultimately did not sit next to me as he had originally wanted, but not as a result of compelling reasoning or a brave display on my part. The pressure on seating space simply relaxed.

The unexpected and unprompted belligerence of this total stranger nevertheless left an impression on me. Despite having accumulated more than a year’s worth of experience living in New York City, I had never encountered the stereotypically rude resident so often portrayed in movies and television. I wondered if maybe the “nasty New Yorker” was a myth, a relic of the city’s past like peep shows in Times Square or epidemic muggings. Only when I was leaving the city – literally my last hour there – did my picture of the Big Apple enlarge to include a rotten spot.

I suppose the whole incident amounts to little more than minor tarnish in the grand scheme of things, though. 365+ days to one isn’t a bad record.

And, maybe the old man was on to something. There may be a proper “New York” bus etty-quit that I ain’t currently got, but for now those lessons will have to wait for next semester.

Posted by The Elephant on May 26th, 2008 under Et cetera | Comment now »
The Elephant and the Library Fine

Graduation from high school affords one the opportunity to outgrow many odious things, hourly bells, yellow buses, and Madame Bovary to name a few.

Insufferable librarians, it appears, are not among them.

Here at college, I yet again find myself stymied by those maddeningly obnoxious book bureaucrats, those pasty stacks-dwellers who from behind their lofty circulation desk thrones wield fearsome imperium over the vast expanses of – the library.

This latest encounter begins with a trip Sunday afternoon to the Reserves section of Columbia’s Butler Library, where I was swiftly and loudly informed that I owed a fine.

The average person at first may not grasp the magnitude of what this means in library culture. To a librarian, owing a fine is tantamount to withholding Willie Nelson-levels of back taxes or committing multiple felony hit-and-runs. It is a deep and embarrassing streak of shame that in a fairer universe would resolve only with a precisely delivered blow to the knee-cap.

One can imagine, then, how indignant the Reserves librarian must have been to see on her computer monitor that my fine totaled in the triple digits, nearly $113. She shot me a suspicious look – as if to make sure I was not at that moment trying to light a book on fire or jimmy the lock on the rare books display – and then sternly informed me I would not be able to check out any books until I paid the fine.

I can’t say I didn’t expect something like this would happen, actually. When I left Columbia in the back of an ambulance on the night before Thanksgiving two years ago, I had about a dozen library books sitting in my dorm room. They were not overdue at the time, but my subsequent, unexpected hospitalization quickly extended past the date stamped in their inside covers.

As November became December, the books remained locked in my room accruing fines, and a variety of external factors, including my lack of contact with fellow students, strict dorm security procedures, and my distance from campus (no person can be in two places at once, thank you quantum mechanics), left me with no way to return the books. Only in January, when my father and I returned briefly to New York to move out of my dorm room, could I return the books at last.

Given the extenuating circumstances, one might have compassion and waive the fees. Not this librarian. She scrunched up her face as I began to explain my story, clearly displeased with my deadbeat book-borrowing.

“You’ll have to take it up with the library supervisor,” she instructed me. “And he’s not here right now. Come back tomorrow.”

Naturally, this suggestion (or should I say, command) was both convenient and helpful. I neither needed the book immediately for legitimate schoolwork nor had a packed schedule that could not accommodate lengthy visits to the dusty recesses of library administrative offices. The only reason I asked for the book in the first place was to bring a delightfully wry sense of irony to her otherwise bland day.

(On the chance that the preceding sarcasm passed by unnoticed, I warn against watching any modern television.)

I admit I toyed with the idea of never paying the fine, going through whatever lengths necessary to circumvent the library’s asinine policies as a matter of principle and spite, but I figured such a stance would put me but one cardigan away from crotchety old-man-dom. I came back to Butler Library the next day.

My arguments were prepared for this supervisor, though I was not sure what to expect. I had never challenged a library fine before and I had never dealt with library upper management, so my imagination was free to run wild. I ultimately pictured this supervisor as a hybrid of Bowser, the end-level Nintendo boss from “Super Mario Brothers,” and George C. Scott.

What I actually got was a fragile-looking, Bohemian twentysomething who no doubt would have been as comfortable working the espresso machine at Open Eye Café as assigning Dewey decimal numbers.

“You are over the limit on fines,” he told me, pulling up my information in the borrower database. This conversation was not beginning promisingly.

“Yes, so I’ve been told. That’s why I am here; I want to appeal those fines.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

I was fighting an urge to roll my eyes and sigh, but I began to lay out the essential points of my case. He interrupted me just as I began to bring up the ambulance ride in a bid for sympathy.

“I’m sorry, but we have a policy on overdue fines.”

Apparently, the terms of Butler Library borrower privileges are inscribed on the back of the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

“I assumed you did, but I believe my special circumstances aren’t taken into account by your policies.”

“We generally don’t waive fines.”

The brick wall of bureaucratic bull-headedness quickly approaching, I shifted tactics. I remembered where I was, how in New York City, loudness gets results.

“Look, these fines make no sense,” I pushed. Adrenaline kicked in and I stood squarely, hoping to seem more imposing physically. “It was impossible for me to return the books since I was hospitalized in another state. And I showed good faith by returning them as soon as I was able. I tried to do the right thing, and now you’re penalizing me for it.”

The chinks in the supervisor’s argument turned into cracks and collapsed. He sighed.

“Which fines do you want removed?”

“All of them.”

A flurry of mouse clicks later, the fines were gone. Such bluster for a request so easily fulfilled!

He had to save face, though.

“And… Well… In the future, call us and advise about your situation if you have checked-out books so this does not happen again.”

Right. In the event of hospitalization, my first concern – above my health, above my family, above my schooling – will be my library books.

And I thought high school was over. No matter; I still talked my way out of $113 in fines.

Posted by The Elephant on January 29th, 2008 under Et cetera | Comment now »

Peanuts


The Elephant's treat.
Little morsels I've swept up from remnants of draft posts.

Off the Tusk

Quick reviews of the Elephant's latest film screenings.