Riding downtown to the cowboys

We went downtown on the Broadway Local and the conductor was a guy who liked his job, you could tell by the rhythms of his voice as he called out the stops, and the cheerful “Watch for the closing doors, please” and now and then a “Thanks for riding” and tossing in notable sites, “Columbus Circle” and “Lincoln Center” and “Port Authority Bus Terminal,” the one where we’d be sleeping someday when the portfolio crashes.

Crime is down in the city, which my relatives in the Heartland don’t want to believe, but we have a terrific new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a Harvard grad who spent a few years as sanitation commissioner, if you can imagine that. Harvard grads are supposed to work in the Brookings Institution; she made the city cleaner by picking up trash at midnight instead of 6 a.m., frustrating the rat population. She’s spent 16 years in the NYPD — “I know it like the back of my hand” — and she uses the word “recidivism” easily, the revolving door, a handful of persons responsible for hundreds of crimes.