repetition and difference

Endless rows of houses extending out their modern lines and sunset colors like strips of pastel monopoly houses comprise the imaginary rendering of my neighborhood and every neighborhood in Northern California that I can envision. Rows of matching domesticity zagging across the golden rolling hills haphazardly and regardless of terrain. Driveways extending strait as sunbeams from cul-de-sacs. Dry and dusty sidewalks and a lone tennis ball hanging near the gutter from yesterday’s street hockey match. This is the image my mind has preserved of the anonymity of my childhood neighborhood. But it was not always this way.

It’s difficult to tell at what point as a child you begin to notice that some things are the same, and some things are different. You look at the oranges in a bowl on the kitchen table as you’re eating breakfast and you know that all those round things are oranges, and that their color is orange, and the towels in the upstairs bathroom are also orange, but not in the same way. Just close enough that you can call them both orange.

But there are plenty of things that are almost the same that we don’t even recognize as being the same. Objects like houses seem as though they are completely unique. Except as any ex-suburban kid from California will tell you, they’re not. One day as I was sitting in the backseat of the car and Mom and I were driving toward home, it struck me that a lot of the houses on our street were the exact same house as our house, but in different colors. How had I never seen it before? They all had the one peaked roof with the triangle windows. The front door off to the side. The massive garage doors on the front. It had never occurred to me that the reason I instinctively knew where the bathroom was in my friend’s house up the street was because it was the exact same house as my house. Her brother’s bedroom had high ceilings like mine, and her parents had a big bathroom like my parents did, except theirs was a mess and had toothpaste splattered all over the mirror and dirty clothes piled in the bathtub instead of the hamper. And their house, which was my house, had the tv in the wrong corner of the family room, and had a strange smell in the kitchen. Also, they didn’t have a dog, or a hot tub, and we did.

After this realization, I found that when entering some neighbor’s house which was the same as my house I would immediately compare its interior and its backyard to my own and find ways in which it was inferior and in no way comparable to my own home. Blue mini-blinds Mrs. Chu? Bad choice. No steps to the front door? Decidedly less grand. I was embarrassed by the idea that we lived in a track-home and that there was nothing special about our high ceilings because my best friend’s father designed custom homes, and she lived in a house that was like no other on the street.

Of course, now that my parents no longer live in California or that house, I can see the beauty of the open floor plan and note that reproducing such an ideal plan for family living was a smart and efficient thing to do, no different than the way each floor of an apartment building mirrors the one below. It’s only now that I am beginning to unravel the sullen pinwheel of monopoly houses to remember the way our street curved down a hill and toward an old oak tree that nearly divided the road.

Song of the Subway

After riding the subway over the course of many many months, it is not surprising that a person will begin to develop a nuanced relationship not only to its multicolored pathways, or to the differing widths of a train’s cars, but also to its sounds. When approaching the stairway into a station, the familiar whoosh or screech tells you if a train is leaving or arriving and whether you ought to bother pushing past the couple ambling down the steps with the stroller. In that same moment, a keen ear can also detect whether the low hum of the approaching train is moving uptown or downtown, and whether one ought to risk jumping the turnstile when her metrocard just won’t register on the machine.

Yet these are relatively common skills among the average subway rider, and the sounds they are able to identify are not especially pleasant. But over the last several months I have made an eerie discovery about the sounds of the new trains they have begun to install on the 2/3 and 4/5/6 lines. Most people recognize them by their violet bench seats, but I think of them as the trains that sing the opening line of “Somewhere” from West Side Story. If you know the tune, sing the first three or four words “There’s a place…” It’s a unique melody because the first interval is a minor seventh. It’s dissonant. Foreboding. It resolves to the sixth, but the whir of the subway does not settle there.

The first time I heard it, I thought it was just a coincidence, but I began to realize that all of the new trains sing the same song. There must be a very simple mechanical reason for this, but it made me wonder if somewhere deep in the subway factory some funny little fellow with a love of this song engineered the subway to sing it just so.