A month or two later and the many planters and pots on the deck would come to delirious life. We spent a great deal of time out there before the heat of the summer, when the reddish boards became as hot as Manhattan asphalt. Later Terence painted the boards a half dozen different colors and our amenity became a work of art in which one could find a comfortable chair and drink wine.

H holds Bunny, gifted by neighbors soon after she got home from the hospital. Bunny was cute in his Oskosh jeans ensemble; he travelled with her all over the world and slept with her every night.

My brother-in-law shot this one with its burned-in date stamp. I'm standing on our deck in Garrison looking out over the trees below. H was about to be two years old. My hair was already gray; it turned when I was still in my twenties. I was wearing it long again, an affect that came and went till I was much older. I was born in the 50s and matured in the 60s; in my teens almost everyone I admired had long hair. (Almost everyone—I never got over role models James Mason, Cary Grant, and Sean Connery.)

I went through Catholic high school and couldn’t sport my own version of hippie hair till halfway through 1971. The crop was standing tall by ’72 and stayed that way till it was harvested sometime in the early 80s. By then I was driving a cab and playing at the same clubs as all the skinhead hardcore bands. One night I went at it with dull scissors and ended up with a convict cut, very much like Magwich at the start of the David Lean Oliver Twist. After that it got long every once in a while and I'd find a local barber to chop it all off.

When I began seeing Carolyn towards the end of the 80s I knew she liked it shorter. I was also teaching school and then suffering through a series of corporate jobs where the not-at-Woodstock look dominated. Every once in a while, though, the hippie dream would re-emerge: I'd let my freak flag fly. I would just not get it cut. I remember telling people that I didn't want to be mistaken for a Republican.

Over time I began to see how our hard water—we drew it from a well in the front yard—did a number on my silvery locks. They would yellow before my eyes. It was good water for everything but hair and old pipes. A plumber described my hill as a sort of natural paradise: “Good water up that hill!” I still miss the taste, a nice blend of minerals and naturally-filtered aquifer flow. The well was deep, though that doesn't mean we didn't test for pathogens.

Our next-door neighbor Bart had his tested, too, and it turned out to be tainted with E. coli. At first he blamed us and reported our septic tank to the county. Since our septic was an acre’s length away from his well (and downhill) it turned out his own tank was the problem, the one buried right next to his well. This was the same guy who wouldn’t pay his share of the road plowing; he left it to the other thirteen homes on our steep-graded, severely eroded, jointly-owned dirt road. He defined bad neighbor.

Wendy and Claude, a couple we'd gotten to know during Carolyn's bartending days at Downtown Beirut, invited friends up to City Island to see them embark on a round-the-world sea voyage. Claude had retired after twenty years in the Coast Guard; they sold their Brooklyn apartment and had a sailing craft built from the proceeds. The trip was never completed and came to a nearly tragic end one night off the coast of Venezuela—they lost their rudder, something that should never have happened on a newly-constructed boat.

They were rescued by the Venezualen navy; their small dog had to be stuffed in a bag and tossed from one boat to the other. The unsteerable boat foundered and sank shortly afterwards. I believe legal action was initiated against the shipwright.

I’m cautious. My mother told me I’d held my little brother back from crossing the street, waiting to be sure there were no cars, and only then taking his hand and walking into the avenue. It sounds altruistic and caring but I suspect I was more concerned about the blame if he got hurt; that sounds more like the way my little brain operated. Social fears rule my life.

I let disagreements linger for years rather than risk a confrontation. I don’t send food back in restaurants. There’s so many things I won’t do, from dancing at a wedding reception to not sticking out a foot to trip that purse snatcher who ran right by me on Stuyvesant Street. In addition to any purely social death trap, I remain terrified of riding a roller coaster, a horse, a motorcycle, even a speed-assist bicycle. Or any bicycle for that matter, especially now that I have dizzy spells; I fear falls more than anything else. A broken bone, anything that prevents me from being able to walk for a while, will be the end of me. I’ll die immobile in a chair like my grandfather did after his stroke.

Thus it's no revelation that I don't like cars or planes or boats. Especially cars—what a disastrous development they’ve been! One needs them in the country and I had two when I lived in the wilds of Putnam County. Most of us don’t live in undeveloped areas—that's part of their definition. Yet most of us still have cars because we live in places like my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, a desert when it comes to mass transit. In these places driving is an integral part of the culture, part of growing up; you weren’t an adult till you drove.

Columbus couldn’t wait to grow up either, and part of that was eliminating every last vestige of mass transit. Trains and streetcars represented the past; the bright and shiny future had an internal combustion engine. I don’t remember the street cars, they were gone by the 50s. I remember the last train to Dayton from Union Station; my mother took us as she knew the significance of the event. Columbus remains the largest city in the United States without any kind of rail.

I can’t forget the smell of the diesel-powered buses I took to go downtown. It was overpowering; standing near the exhaust felt dangerous. It was difficult to read on the bus because of nausea from the fumes.

I’ve lived in New York City for a long time and mass transit can be a real pain in the ass. As I write we’re living through another cycle of fear stirred up by those who don’t understand numbers or find it useful not to understand numbers. Three-point-two million riders per day deal with about six felonies per day. While the incidents are scary—people shot on station platforms, pushed on the tracks, punched by random strangers—it’s important to remember that the daily tally of these incidents can often be counted on one hand. Not very comforting if you’re the victim, but actually consoling if you live in a world ruled by actuaries. The statistics are often edited to yield the worst possible interpretation: on a weekend when eight felonies occur rather than the usual six, headlines read “33% increase in subway crime!” The governor’s reaction to the current cycle of hysteria has been to place fully-armed National Guard troops at some of the major stations. This is not a reasonable reaction.

Those same suburban residents who have been taught to fear the trains (and the big city in general) don’t think twice about climbing into a car, the one place where they are closer to death than at any other point in their lives. About fifty-thousand a year die in cars, a total that always make me think of the number of names on Maya Lin’s wall in Washington DC.

Carolyn took the train in 2002 so H could see grandma back in Kansas. I don’t know why I didn’t go, though it was probably related to work. It’s an overnight ride from NYC to Chicago; an eight-hour layover, then another long ride that gets to Salina, Kansas, at about three o’clock in the morning. One has to be picked up in Salina; there are no cabs or buses or anything at that time of the morning in Kansas. Amtrak runs so few trains across the country that this is always a problem if you’re stopping anywhere between Los Angles and Boston. If I take a train to Columbus—well, you don’t take a train to Columbus, there isn’t one. You take a train to Cleveland and get off at three in the morning. After a few hours you switch to a bus (or again, someone drives three hours to pick you up).

In countries with healthy train systems (none of which, anywhere, are expected to run a profit) you don’t face these daunting arrival times. You just get another train, a train that is clean, efficient, reasonably priced, and fast. Their arrivals and departures are on time; they don’t share tracks with freight lines, the cause of many Amtrak delays on the tracks that Amtrak owns and maintains.

In countries with healthy train systems taxpayers don’t just subsidize airports and highways like we do in the US. There are no fixed fees anywhere to fund the trains. Ninety percent of gasoline taxes are earmarked for highways; the built-in ticket subsidies fund airports. Amtrak goes begging every couple years for funds from politicos who don’t understand how mass transit—or anything that doesn’t consume vast quantities of hydrocarbons—works. It is in their interest, of course, not to understand.

They believe Amtrak should cut more services, eliminate more trains, and put cheaper food in the dining cars. In all mass transit systems there is a tipping point: cut enough services and raise enough prices and the customers stop coming. In this cycle, finally, there isn’t enough to meet operating expenses or even basic maintenance of infrastructure. New Yorkers who follow the issue have seen this happen with our subways again and again.