A previous post, the title of which started with “I Can’t Appreciate”, obviously should have said “I Can Appreciate”… Gotta go back and fix that.
A few days ago I took a 2 train to Borough Hall in Brooklyn and walked from there to Cobble Hill along 5th Avenue and then over to 4th Avenue where I think I stopped at about 40th Street. It was all about the kiosks, the street theater, and getting as much use of an unlimited MetroCard as I reasonably can. The D train, man I never knew it was such a bullet through Brooklyn. I could look it up but but the ride from Barclays Center to 36th Street must be one of the longest uninterrupted routes in the system. I also encountered for the first time another entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery existed. The other entrance is quite a bit humbler than the vaunted gateway that is the cemetery’s main entrance.
More importantly I decided to return to the D train today after spotting this yesterday, like a miracle:
PRAY Scratchiti on the D Train
That I dare say, is the real thing, the likes of which I used to see on payphones seemingly everywhere I looked. Today I spot what is possibly the work of PRAY, as I wrote about over on the payphone site, but there is no way for sure to verify if etchings like “GO TO CHURCH READ BIBLE” or “MERCY” are from the hands of PRAY. but encountering like this, completely by chance, was amazing. I imagined her sitting on the exact same spot as I, 30+ years ago, hard at work on this earnest pursuit. How would she feel knowing her message was still being received? It didn’t make me head to church but it increased the feeling of astonishment and respect for the singularity of purpose at work here. It does not look especially easy to chisel letters from this surface, nor does it look trivial to do the same on the steel surface of payphone enclosures.
