My mother’s parents met on the New York City subway. In a car of the E train during rush hour. It was 1938. My granddad Harry was reading William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and when he went to turn the page my grandmother Pearl put her hand on his and said she wasn’t finished reading. How many different cars were on that train? How many different trains came through that station? How many different train lines could they each have lived on? How many different cities could their parents have emigrated to? And so on and so on back for all of history.
