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captainsblogAs is my usual Monday custom when I'm oot and aboot in the car, I listened to the CD of Wait Wait from yesterday's broadcast. The show, like its Car Talk cousin, creates the illusion of NPR listeners calling in, when actually you leave your name by phone or email and they call you. The host usually chats up the "caller" for a moment or two about his or her home town, and today's segments were no different; the last of them, though, struck a familiar note for me, since she was from the Lawn Guyland town of Babylon.
I think my family had friends out there at some point, but I remember the town mainly for two things. Most notably, for being the final stop on the Long Island Rail Rot south shore line which was usually my pipe to and from "da city," Merrick and Bellmore being the closest stops to my onetime home and Seaford being where my sister lived. To this day, I can recite every stop on that line as called out in Penn Station by station agents with graduate degrees in Rapid Gibberish. I also remember it from high school years, when I always had to be up at an obscene hour to catch the bus (or walk/bike in the austerity year when there warn't none) and every. Fucking. DAY, without fail, the LIRR's 5:55 Babylon-to-Brooklyn train was reported on WCBS as being delayed. It was something out of Groundhog Day, years before the movie even got made.
None of which means anything, really, other than to explain that I've heard of the town, duh. The stranger thing today, though, was at the precise second this lady was announcing herself as being a non-captive of that non-whorish, non-Hanging Garden of a town, I was behind a car on Sheridan Drive in suburban Buffalo, more than 400 miles away from her home town.
The dealer on the car's license plate holder? BABYLON HONDA.
There's got to be some cosmic significance in that. I just have no idea what it is.
I think my family had friends out there at some point, but I remember the town mainly for two things. Most notably, for being the final stop on the Long Island Rail Rot south shore line which was usually my pipe to and from "da city," Merrick and Bellmore being the closest stops to my onetime home and Seaford being where my sister lived. To this day, I can recite every stop on that line as called out in Penn Station by station agents with graduate degrees in Rapid Gibberish. I also remember it from high school years, when I always had to be up at an obscene hour to catch the bus (or walk/bike in the austerity year when there warn't none) and every. Fucking. DAY, without fail, the LIRR's 5:55 Babylon-to-Brooklyn train was reported on WCBS as being delayed. It was something out of Groundhog Day, years before the movie even got made.
None of which means anything, really, other than to explain that I've heard of the town, duh. The stranger thing today, though, was at the precise second this lady was announcing herself as being a non-captive of that non-whorish, non-Hanging Garden of a town, I was behind a car on Sheridan Drive in suburban Buffalo, more than 400 miles away from her home town.
The dealer on the car's license plate holder? BABYLON HONDA.
There's got to be some cosmic significance in that. I just have no idea what it is.