Bensonhurst, 1966 – My dad drove us in from Long Island, where I’d been born and lived all my life, to stay with our grandmother. She was taking my little sister and me to Radio City Music Hall. I was ten years old and had never been on the subway before.

We took the N train from Avenue U to 36^th Street. The station looked like the entranceway to a secret passage, or a tomb. We walked in and to the left, where there was a tall, narrow cage with a woman inside.

My grandmother bickered with her, “Twenty cents! When did it go up?” 

Glaring, she snapped open her purse and pushed a dollar at the woman. I heard a jingle, then my grandmother scooped something from a metal cup, leaned down to my sister and me and said, “Don’t lose it. You need it to get on the train.”  In each of our hands, she’d put a round, shiny brass object, with the letter ‘Y’ cut out of the center. Treasure. The subway had secret passageways and treasure.

Those passageways had to be protected against blackguards and raiders, I thought. That’s why there was an entryway made of metal bars, which my grandmother steered us toward next. She took the token from my sister’s hand and dropped it in a slot. There was a click-clicking noise. Placing her hands on the entrance bars, she scooted my sister in front of her and propelled forward. The bars moved, circling clear and my sister and grandmother got through to the other side.

“You next,” instructed my grandmother to me, as she held my sister‘s hand. I placed the token in the slot as I’d seen my grandmother do and put my hand on the bars. There was that clicking sound again, but I stood there, stymied.

“Push and walk! Quick!” called my grandmother and nervously I obeyed. Once more the bars circled and I was through, too.

We climbed a long, steep series of odd-smelling stairs and astonishingly, we were outside again, on a cement platform. My grandmother, still holding my sister’s hand, headed straight for a wooden bench against the wall and sat. I gawked down and far at the seemingly endless, thick, oil-dark, wooden track, which was armored by gravel and litter. My sister sidled over to get a look, too.

“Don’t go too near the edge,” warned my grandmother.

From the distance, I heard a deep, echoing sound I couldn’t place and the platform shivered beneath me. My grandmother stood up at once. “Come hold on to me, both of you. It’s coming.”           

We hurried to her, as the train came barreling closer, a steely barrage of sound and strength and speed. It skidded slowly to a stop, squealing and hissing. My sister leaned closer into my grandmother’s side, who soothed her, “Don’t be afraid, just watch your step.”

The train doors glided open like an easy miracle and with them, so did my world.

Inside, the subway teemed with humanity. There were hundreds of strangers and they were all shapes, sizes and colors.

“Stop staring at people,” my grandmother admonished.

The train rumbled along, out in the sun and then at once, we dropped deep into a tunnel that was as dark as outer space. The darkness made everyone’s image clearly visible through the windows of the train, as though the windows were mirrors. As the train hurtled through and the lights on the tunnel walls flashed by, I held my breath for what would come next: My first steps into Manhattan.

Nine years later, in 1975 – I still lived on Long Island. One day, I looked at the boy whose engagement ring I had on my finger and said, “I want to get a job in Manhattan and ride the subway to work.” 

And he laughed and said, “That’s funny.”

Then it was 1978 – I’d just turned 22 and was again sitting on the N train. My left ring finger was bare. I was smiling to myself, because it was my first train ride to my new job in Manhattan. I lived in Brooklyn now, not too far from my grandmother, and I worked on 67^th Street and 6^th Avenue –“The Diamond Exchange” – for an importer of semi-precious stones, who filled orders for the jewelers on the street. Tiger’s eye, red jasper and malachite, bloodstone, opals, sapphires, rubies; I counted them out and bagged them into tiny plastic bags.

On the way back home, I was daydreaming so much about my first day, the noises and scents of the city, the music of the street musicians playing in the stations and how I looked in my new suit reflected in the train windows, that I didn’t notice I’d taken the subway uptown instead of down. I didn’t know how to get off and back on without paying another fare, so I ended up in Queens before the train reversed its way back to Brooklyn again.

By 1983, Queens was where I’d been living for three years – A seasoned patron of the New York City transit system by then,  I was careful not to stand too close to the subway platform edge, after the first reported madman had pushed a woman onto the tracks. I smiled at no passengers, after a man dressed in the black garments and headwear of  an Hasidic Jew, had managed to cop a solid feel of my thigh and I adamantly refused to give money to the endless stream of beggars, drunks and street people. There’d been fare increases and we had Diamond Jubilee tokens, “token sucking” “token hoarding,“ and “token wars.”  Subway stations and subway trains, system-wide, were in a dreadful and dangerous state of disrepair. Mayor Edward Koch was incensed when he discovered that foreign countries were reporting in their travel-to-New York brochures, that it was “permissible” to write one’s name on the walls of a New York City subway car. It was true the graffiti was more interesting to read than the adverts on the trains and that’s how I occupied my time while traveling. Besides, it was always way too crowded to unfold a newspaper comfortably. But I was still entranced with the underground musicians, who played and sang below Carnegie Hall, as well as the ones within it.

In 1989, I took my two-year-old son on his first subway ride – You were still allowed to leave children in their open strollers on the trains then. He sat there, in that stroller, as transfixed by his first ride as I’d been on mine. I watched him as he absorbed it all - the hoards of people moving in and out, the sound of the electronic bells as they “bing-bonged” to signal the opening and closing of the subway doors. When we got off the train by Broadway and 7^th, he let out a sound that was half a shout of fear, half a gasp of delighted awe. Times Square was more spectacular than The Land of Oz.

He was almost eight and had loved Manhattan all his young life when we took our last subway ride together in 1995. Now we were moving, not only out of Astoria, but out of the country, to Athens, Greece. Feverishly we soaked up memories. Downtown to the World Trade Center, than up to The Central Park Zoo, then the FAO Schwartz toy store across the street. Over to 6th and back down again to the Warner Brothers store to see “Marvin the Martian,” and the Superman elevator. We had dinner at The Jekyll and Hyde Café, his favorite, but this time we took a taxi to the one on 7th Avenue South, because he so wanted to see Frankenstein’s monster lowered down from the ceiling. Then we walked in Greenwich Village and SoHo until we could walk no more. And took the long subway ride to Queens, one final time, home. 

I came back to New York for a visit in 1996 and stopped short abruptly when I entered the station on 34^th Street, astonished at the changes one year had made. The station gleamed and there was a target board set up so people could throw their chewed gum and aim for the ‘bulls-eye,’ instead of discarding it onto the cement floor, as they’d always done. The beggars on the trains were missing in action and so were the street vendors that sold knock-off designer wear and three-day old falafel. Police were everywhere and Times Square looked like Disneyland.

Another nine years went by, but in 2005 – I got to see Manhattan and ride the subway again.

I was back in the United States and living in northern California, but one of my best friends still lived in Manhattan and I flew in to visit her. I was staying in Flushing, so this time I headed into the city on the 7. We were planning to meet in midtown, where she was working and then take a taxi to dinner downtown.

To my disappointment, one needed a Metrocard to ride the subway. Subway tokens were gone.

And, of course, so were the Towers.

But as I stepped on, I heard street musicians and everything came back as though I’d never left. The strap handles and steel bars, the space between the platform and doors, the smells of fuel and human and cement and city, the coordination of thousands of passengers in a graceful ballet, gliding in and out of stations and swaying their way up subways stairs onto the Manhattan streets. They make their way through a net of other pedestrians, who, without even a glance left, right, or up from their cell phones, know just where to walk, which beautifully choreographed steps to take, to get where they need to go.  

I stopped a moment to take it all in and spotted my friend hurrying her way down the sidewalk towards me.

“Are you okay?” she asked breathlessly. “I was worried you might feel overwhelmed after all this time…” She didn’t finish her sentence once she observed my glowing face.

“Listen,” I said. “Do you mind not taking a taxi? Let’s take the subway, instead.”

Patricia V. Davis’s essays, opinion articles and celebrity interviews have appeared in various newspapers and magazines nationally and internationally. She is the author of If This Woman is Being Operated Recklessly, which appeared alongside Laurence Ferlinghetti's work in New Press magazine and other published poems on women’s issues. Her first letter to Sports Illustrated regarding the Beijing Olympics and the genocide in Darfur was their highlighted editorial in the June 4, 2007 issue. While living in New York, she was the invited featured poet at many poetry events, including those sponsored by Upfront Muse in Tribeca. She holds a Master's Degree in Creative Writing and Education from Queens College and C.W. Post University and has taught extensively in private and public high schools in the United States and Greece. These days she blogs and writes on a wide assortment of subjects. Her commentaries and zany social and political satires can now be found on vox.com, newsvine.com, digg.com, forums /sealpress.net, huffingtonpost.com and workitmom.com. An acclaimed motivational speaker, Patricia gets to the hearts and minds of her audience. Patricia's first non-fiction book, Harlot's Sauce: A Memoir of Love, Loss, Food, Family and Greece has just been completed and is represented by Jamie Brenner at Artists and Artisans in Manhattan. (jamie@artistsandartisans.com). For more information on Patricia's previous publications, visit her website at www.harlotssauce.com.