I’ve been all over Queens this week. Briarwood, Hillside, Forest Hills, Flushing, Glendale… The MTA bus map is such an intricate and fascnating squall. So many connections. And in many parts of Queens the buses really motor through almost every minute, as frequently as subways. I think it’s a better way to see the city than the subway, for obvious reasons. The subway takes youfrom point A and deposits you at point B. Nothing wrong with that. Generally it is probably more efficient, assuming Point B is exactly where you want to go. Today I got to Glendale via the mercurial Q102 bus to the R train to the 7 train to the Q29 bus. I could have made a more efficient route but I wanted to make the Q102 part of the day, seeing as it basically stops/starts right at my front door. The more efficient route would have been R or M to Woodhaven, and the Q29 from there to Glendale, where the destination was Mount Lebanon Cemetery. The only bus that lands closer to Mt. Lebanon is the Q55.
My mission today was maybe a little unusual. It was follow up to yesterday’s humorously failed attempt to find peace and quiet at the Calvary Chapel. In the past I have sat in that chapel and been amazed at its near tomb-like silence. And in the winter it is very well heated. It is appropriate to call Calvary Chapel’s silence tomb like. The place actually is a tomb. A religious dignitary of yore is said to be entombed under the floor near the pulpit. I looked around and found only one other chapel on a cemetery property. It’s in a Jamaica cemetery, but is evidently not open to the public.
The trek to Mt. Lebanon was in my personal interest. I wanted to see if it was as cracklingly quiet there as I remembered it being when I was there maybe 4 years ago. It was. The silence there is profound, especially near the fence that separates Mt. Lebanon from the cemetery next door. I would like to be there at night, when the silence would be even deeper.
Certain soundns are allowed in this assessment of silence. Weed whackers, airplanes passing overhead, sirens wailing. Crickets, of course, are allowed. Crickets virtually define silence.
Well summer is ending and that means it gets dark earlier. And that means I cannot see what I am typing anymore. This dimly lit pub…
