The Ancestral Metro North

on ghosts, grandfathers and drunken Yankee Fans

There are spiritual communities the world over that encourage ancestral work — that is, connecting to your ancestors, making food for them, being in relationship with them, asking them to help guide you — all of which I have done. But I’ve often approached it with some wariness. It’s not because I’m necessarily spooked by the idea of engaging with my ancestors, though I know that there are some neer-do-wells in my lineage that I most likely do not want to be in communication with. It’s more that I’ve felt the presence of ghosts everywhere my entire life, and the idea of inviting more in isn’t particularly attractive. There I said it, ok!!! I see and feel dead people. This is my official letter of recognition of all the spirits I’ve been kept up by at night. As a child, it scared the shit out of me; now, it gives me mild insomnia.

That being said, I’ve been thinking a lot about my maternal grandfather this week and feeling his presence — I’ve felt moved to connect to him. I have been staying in White Plains, New York. If you’re not familiar with it, White Plains is your run-of-the-mill suburban town 45 minutes outside of NYC. It’s where my mother’s family comes from.

It’s where my grandmother grew up and raised all her kids. She spent almost her entire life here. By some strange stroke of fate, my dad’s sister ended up marrying my mother’s childhood best friend’s brother. I know — it’s a mouthful and sort of hard to wrap your head around. They’re the only family I have who have stayed in the area. I’m grateful they did because it tethers me to my childhood: I’ve been coming to their house since I was in the womb; it’s where my parents got married — my mother six months pregnant with me.

A couple of days ago, I took the Metro North into the city to meet a friend for dinner. It’s your classic commuter train. I got to the station just in time for the 4:51 pm, which would get me into the city for 5:39 pm. The express train clocks in at a cool 48 minutes, though sometimes it’s 37. I sat behind a guy who had splayed himself out across four seats, feet up, headphones on, watching a film on his phone as if he was in his living room (his shoes rubbed the seats, which of course, made me acutely aware of my own germ-infested seat). I wished for some Lysol wipes or at the very least that I hadn’t just run out of hand sanitiser. For whatever reason, this made me think about my grandpa and whether people splayed out like this during his years riding this route. His name was Gordon, and he was an adman — think Don Draper in Mad Men replete with the regular three martini lunch lifestyle.

I don’t know much about Gordon beyond the family lore, at least not in an intimate way. How well do you ever really know your grandparents? He died of a heart attack when I was two years old. The memories I have of him blend together with photos that were taken of us when I was a baby. I’m not sure what’s real and what’s imagined, memories plucked out from the heavy photo albums from the 80s that are filled with countless childhood photos. There’s one where he’s holding me aloft, both of us smiling with delight. There’s one where we both wear wigs on the steps of the family home. Gordon was talkative and friendly: I’ve been told he could talk to a paper plate and find something interesting about it. He’d befriend anyone and everyone, something I’ve seen my mother and four aunts do my whole life. He and my grandmother had five girls in succession. They hoped my mother, the fourth born, would be a boy. They gave her a name to show it: Lesley Gordon. He came from West Virginia and told people he was of Welsh origin. He was actually German, originating a family knack for stretching the truth. I guess he thought it was better to be Welsh than bear the shame of being German following WWII. An antiquated impulse these days. Beyond these details and a few family stories, I don’t feel like I have much of a sense of who he was or what he was like. How strange that a figure that looms so large in the minds of our parents can be so foreign to us, the children.

As the train pulled out of the station, I wondered what Gordon’s daily commute into the annals of Grand Central was like. We passed through the leafy green suburbs — bright with the bursting life at the end of summer. I can only imagine how much more verdant it was in the 1950s and 60s. I never really thought about him beyond an abstract passing from the mythology every family has. He was kind and generous to his kids, but he was extremely absent (bordering on neglectful), and I’ve felt anger towards him and my grandmother for that — though they were only a product of their time and trauma. I exited the train and walked up the steps into the main terminal, with its beautiful ceiling. I wondered if he looked up in awe at the beauty of it, as I always do and think, “Ok, New York, you’re not that bad.’

I imagined him taking the 8:16 am train out of North White Plains each day, suit and tie on even in the most sweltering summer heat. What was the air conditioning situation on the Metro North in the 1950s? What were the trains like? Did they serve food and drink? I imagined him with the New York Times in hand, flipping through its pages. How did he feel each day? What was it like for him to be the father of five girls? Did he avoid parenthood or run towards it (or both)? What made him decide to become a New Yorker, and how did he make his way into advertising? Also, what did the Metro North look like before smartphones? Did people have conversations with one another? Was it more social than it is now? Or did we always ignore each other, heads in a book or newspaper, avoiding eye contact? I’m sure some of my family have the answers to these questions and will most likely email me endless details after this newsletter, but it’s more fun for me to pontificate on what the answers might be instead of what they actually are.

On the way home, I missed the 9:52 pm and had to wait around with the other suburban folk to get the 10:32 pm back to the leafy streets of Westchester. There is nowhere to sit down in Grand Central late at night (cruel), so I paced the basement staring at Shake Shack’s menu for entertainment. On the train, I took out my phone to look at the Instagram universe, and it promptly died, gifting me an hour to read David Sedaris’ Calypso — hilarious, touching essays about the suicide of his sister Tiffany. About 20 minutes into my journey, some drama occurred, and my ears perked up. Five guys stood at the other end of the car. They all wore Yankees caps, coming from what I can only assume was a Yankees game. They talked shit; they talked about the game. The train conductor, a woman, walked through the car to check tickets. One of the guys had bought his ticket on his phone and couldn’t show it. When asked to present his ticket, he started yelling:

“This is fuckin’ ridiculous! My phone is dead: I can’t fuckin’ show it to you.”

“You’ll have to show me your ticket, sir.” She replied

“I don’t know what to fuckin’ tell you; my phone is charging. What do you want me to do?”

She walked away from him and went to get her colleague, a man. They two-teamed him now. If he was loud before, now he was positively thunderous. His friends stood sheepishly off to the side.

“I already told you! My FUCKIN’ PHONE IS DEAD. The ticket is ON MY PHONE. Do I get a reward if I show it to you?” Apparently, there was now enough juice in the phone for him to produce his ticket. For what seemed like an eternity, he tapped on his phone, presumably pulling up the ticket. I didn’t want to peel my eyes away from the scene but pretended I was engrossed in my book.

The colleague stood over him, patiently waiting as the drunk Yankee fan ranted and raved about the injustice of the evil MTA employees. He dramatically pointed the phone at the male conductor. Both conductors turned on their heels without a word and walked back through the car. As they both walked away, the Yankee man elicited a loud:

“Where’s my reward now, huh?” And then: “Fuckin’ bitch” for the whole car to enjoy.

Then, probably two cars away by now, the male counterpart yelled back, with too little enthusiasm for my taste:

“Don’t disrespect her.”

“Don’t disrespect her? That was fuckin’ ridiculous. And everyone looks at me like I’M the CRAZY one?” To which his buddies nodded in disbelief and laughed at the “hilarious” wisecracks he had made.

This exchange reinforces my deeply held belief that nothing good can come from organised sports that take seven hours to watch. I went back to David Sedaris. The book is all about his family, so naturally, I zoned out and returned to thoughts of my grandpa. Gordon was an alcoholic and, from what I understand, a pretty bad one. He was well-loved but dysfunctioning, and I sometimes wonder how he had the career he did until Mad Men came out and realised maybe everyone in the 1950s advertising world was an alcoholic. I thought of him coming home after a day’s work on the Metro North, returning to his five kids and my grandma. How many scenes like that had he witnessed in his time? New York has always been New York, after all — and there have always been drunken Yankees fans ready to make a scene.

As I exited the train and walked through the tunnel to the street, it was dark and dead quiet. I got to my car and considered this train station, these streets, this four-minute drive back to my aunt and uncle’s home. I decided to take a detour and drive past the house where my mother and her sisters grew up. I sat for a moment in front of the house, as I’ve done so many times over the years. There is so much history in that house, and yet, every time I do it, I just feel sad — we can’t go back, forward movement makes more sense. Even though none of that side of my family is here now, and the house hasn’t been ours for at least 25 years, it’s the one constant I’ve had in a life made up of countless homes, cities and towns. I marvelled at its size and the improvements the current owners had made: it was lit up like a Christmas tree. I looked around and realised that this town in suburban New York is my ancestral home. The Metro North, an ancestral train. There’s nothing culturally rich about this ancestral place beyond a lake that’s more of a pond, ice cream trucks and a Stop & Shop—plus its proximity to NYC. But it is peaceful, and the greenery abounds.

The Metro North is not at all sexy: it’s a commuter train into NYC, the most generic there is. But there’s a strange bit of comfort for me in its faux leather blue-green seats, AC that runs too cold, even the way it smells. There’s comfort in the millions of stories of commuters on this train: the families built, dreams realised, success gained, failures lived through, people lost, and the inevitable change in a life lived — always change. There’s something hopeful about this train. Even the fights between a drunk Yankee fan and the conductor feel familiar, like home. And in it exists the memory of my grandfather’s life, whose blood runs through me — for better or worse.