Let me repeat my fascination with subways

I doubt that I’ll ever get back to New York City in my remaining years. Even Boston seems like a rarity, though far more likely. Yet let me repeat my fascinating with subway trains and their tunnels.

And Manhattan was, after all, the center of publishing, including best-selling novels.

Tackle that from the perspective of where I live now, where the year-round population would fit on a single subway train. Add the flush of summer people and vacationers or even the cruise ships that visit and it still wouldn’t add up much more. Some of the visiting cruise ships would be like three or four trains arriving and totally discharging for a stroll around the village. A hiccup, then, in comparison to a Manhattan underground station.

My playful novel Subway Visions, grew out of my encounters in the Big Apple way back when.

As I once noted, growing up in a Midwestern city that was too small for rail mass transit, or maybe it was from an intellectual awareness of underground as a conduit of counterculture and spiritual wisdom, subways came to define a Big City for me and to symbolize the range of possibilities present therein. A subway transit system separates cosmopolitan from lesser cities. The trains are filled with real people – a cross-section of the populace between many diverse origins and destinations. As an underground, subways also present counterculture and surrealistic currents many of the riders fail to consider. Here, then, were snapshots from that route.

Later, with my wife and kids, came our outings in Boston and its MBTA.

Or my favorite Dover lifeguard’s revulsion and disgust after relocating to Beantown for college and having a drunken passenger vomit on her sandals on a hot, crowded platform.

So much for my perception of a carnival air.

Still, I think of subways the way I think of rollercoasters, even with our small downtown of boutiques, less pressured than the subway station settings of much of Boston.

Just how do those cruise ship passengers view our village, anyway?

You can find Subway Visions in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. It’s also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain it.