Happy Presidents Day! Would you rather hear me bitch about the subways -- or talk about Iraq? (Or even, gasp, Afghanistan?)

Tsar Boris Godunov (Samuel Ramey here, in San Francisco) ascends to the throne of Russia announcing, "My soul is troubled." Believe me, I know the feeling.

by Ken

Believe me, I don't want to write about Iraq any more than you want to read about it. But look at it this way, would you rather read about Afghanistan?

Not me, for sure. I've taken to deleting en masse posts to the Afghanistan thread on my political listserv. It's not that I don't think it's a big problem. It's just that if you put together what the smart people are saying (and there are smart people, people I respect, on all sides of this issue)

* We can't in the name of decency stand by and do nothing.

* Yet there's nothing we can do that isn't all but guaranteed to actually make the situation even worse -- and that at a tremendous cost in bloodshed, destruction, and dollars.

Sheesh! I'd almost rather talk about Iraq, and I'm afraid we kind of have to. I mean, what are we going to talk about? What fun it is to work on a holiday? Well, okay, bu just for a bit. We've really got to get to Iraq.

You know, I figured there would be this one consolation: an easier subway commute. For one thing, with the much-reduced ridership, even with the reduced holiday schedule, there's going to be a lot less crowding on the trains, and there's even some consolation in knowing that all one's fellow riders are in the same fix: having the privilege of working on Presidents Day. (I know now, from the expeience of Martin Luther King Day, that when I get to my office building in the New York Stock Exchange "compound," in addition to going through the usual airport-style security checks, I will have to sign in -- and the signers will almost all be from my company.)

I have about a 10-minute walk to the subway station that offers me the combination of: (a) a chance of making the journey in not too much more than an hour, and (b) a pretty sure chance, even on a normal business day, of getting a seat, provided I go straight to the back of the platform and wait for the las car. Imagine how cheered I was to get to the outer entrance to the station and find signs on it proclaiming, "NO TRAINS RUNNING."

My first thought was that the signs hadn't been taken down from yesterday, when I recalled there really weren't any trains running. This is a little game that New York City Transit, which operates our city buses and subways, likes to play with us NY-ers, especially on weekends. Every weekend there is a usually long list of route alterations and cancellations. It's posted in every station, and I believe we're responsible for all that material on the midterm. But of course it changes from week to week.

There are, however, old staples -- route changes so beloved by NYCT (which most of us older-timers still think of under its old name, as the TA, or Transit Authority) that they keep bringing them back, like never-say-die vaudevillians. I understand that all these weekend changes are necessary for system maintenance (and even occasional upgrading). I just wonder how it is that these same changes keep popping up. Wouldn't you think that whatever it is they're trying to fix would eventually get, you know, fixed?

Perhaps needless to say, it turned out that the signs weren't left over from yesterday. Well, they were, but that's because apparently for this holiday weekend the weekend changes carried over to today! At least I didn't have to make the long trek from the outer station entrance to the actual train platforms. The steady stream of frustrated commuters coming from that direction -- frowning, shaking their hands, waving us newbies off -- told us that our dream of soon boarding a downtown A train was shattered.

Oh, there were free shuttle buses running, to take passengers to the northernmost functional A station. But there are also two bus routes running on Broadway at that point, and even though they make many more stops, I had the sense to take the Bx7 bus that came along (quickly followed by an M100, but with no shuttle bus in sight). MetroCard users get one free transfer from bus to subway anyway, so it wouldn't cost anything. I did, however, have to suffer the humiliation of riding right smack past the building I'd left 15-20 minutes earlier, and even stopping in the bus stop right across the street from my building.

In all, the adventure didn't add more than 20 minutes, maybe 25, to the trip, and part of that was the (related) fact that, as part of the weekend route changes, the C local train wasn't running, with the A making all local stops, which added some 14 stops to the trip -- but then, who's counting? Still, it set a tone.

At the other end of my A train journey, the connecting train I sometimes take (if one happens to come), to save about five blocks' walk, was shuttered -- apparently another casualty of "weekend" service.

By now, of course, my music program had run out. Delightful as it is, the CD coupling of Arthur Rubinstein playing Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini wouldn't have gotten me all the way to work, With today's Special Expanded itinerary, I had already switched to a recording I'd thrown in mostly because it hit my eye when I was leaving the house. Somehow Mussorgsky's unremittingly grim opera Boris Godunov seemed fairly appropriate as I set off, on foot, on the final leg of the journey -- with the temperature apparently still in the 20s. (I'd heard 28 on the radio earlier.)

At this point we'd gotten through the opening scene, in which a crowd of Russian peasants have been herded up by the police outside Novodevichy monastery, where Boris Godunov, the brother-in-law of the recently deceased Tsar Feodor, is holded up, to beg him to reconsider his refusal to accept the throne in the absence of a legal heir. The boyar Shchelkalov, in his gorgeous address to the crowd (beautifully sung, I have to say, by the fine baritone Arthur Budney), reports that no, Boris is adamant, he will not accept the throne.

And the next scene, officially the second and final scene of the Prologue, is of course the coronation of Tsar Boris (George London, in glorious voice here in 1956), who takes the throne delivering an address filled with gloom and doubt. And then I had to pack up all my stuff for the twin hurdles of bag inspection and the metal detectors.

But speaking of time, I'm afraid ours is up. We'll have to put Iraq off till the next post.

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