Summer Peaches and Tomato Gardens By Anthony Buccino

If the weather was right and Dad's car running well, my Uncle Butch loaded us into the Rambler station wagon and we headed 'down the shore' to Keansburg for a Sunday night at the games.

The big treat of those long ago summers was our annual trip to Olympic Park in Maplewood/Irvington. That great big amusement park was so far away, we took the Garden State Parkway to get there.

 If the weather was right and Dad's car running well, my Uncle Butch loaded us into the Rambler station wagon and we headed 'down the shore' to Keansburg for a Sunday night at the games. Dad wasn't much of a shore person, or a vacation person, either. He's spend all his days on the beach he'd ever want in the Fijis.

 The full moon set over the Parkway as we inched our way north through unbearably slow traffic with a bunch of tied kids sprawled behind the back seat eating peaches.

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Job Rock In Prose By Anthony Buccino

Back in high school, I had a friend who wanted to be a garbage man because "they only work two days a week." Let me close this report by saying, "It isn't all that meets the eye." 

Before the oil embargo I wanted to be a gas station attendant, washing windows, checking oil, pumping gas, etc. The highlight of that career would have been explaining mechanical malfunctions. I'd do it this way:

"Sorry, ma'm, your gravistan is jammed in the forkistran. What we need to fix it is a monolithic jack fork lift to separate and recoil the semi-conductor rectifier. It'll take two weeks and cost about eighty-five thousand dollars." 

Another of my occupational fantasies is to be an over-the-road truck driver. I'd wheel my big rig over the interstate highways talking in code over the CB radio about "smokies" down the road. The best job I could get in this line of work would be as a 'roadie' for a pop star hauling equipment from New York to Detroit in three hours.

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NJ Garden State Parkway Tokens Pay Tolls To Hell By Anthony Buccino

Toll booth advocates espouse the logic of strategically placed roadblocks that make the highway more democratic. For one thing, toll plazas make just about everyone drive at the same speed: zero.

We've always wondered if the old wives who said misery loves company ever spent time, endless smog-filled rush hours in line, attempting to pay a toll on the Garden State Parkway. In countless hours of studying the pained expressions of obsessed drivers queued before the flashing red and green lights at the roadway obstructions, we have never recorded a smile other than the maniacal grin as someone launches a round metal missile at the urinal shaped receptacle.

These token tumbling commuters are not happy campers.

If only they knew how happy they should be. They have the privilege of tooling along the Garden State Parkway from the northern most part of the state to the southernmost pausing occasionally to hurl a coin or two.

Toll booth advocates espouse the logic of strategically placed roadblocks that make the highway more democratic. 

For one thing, toll plazas make just about everyone drive at the same speed: zero.

For another thing, the lines leading up to the slots will help you sharpen your brain power by testing your mettle. 

Regardless of whether you are a right-lane slow poke, a center-lane observer of the posted speed limit, or a left-lane speed demon, any progress you made driving the way you do, will be obliterated as you approach the toll plaza.

The high way authority secretly spent money on sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment that helps to determine which line you are in and then make all the other toll lines move along much, much faster.

 And you thought that was an optical illusion.

This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter By Anthony Buccino

If you ever commuted to work, you'll enjoy reading Anthony Buccino's latest collection This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter about the joys and follies of getting to and from work in the city using metropolitan public transit.

Anthony Buccino spent 12 years editing business news copy at Dow Jones & Co. for the Ticker, NewsPlus and The Wall Street Journal professional web pages. The company was located in Jersey City when he started and 10 years later moved to the NewsCorp building in the Times Square district of mid-town Manhattan.

For his first year working in Jersey City, Buccino actually drove the 12 miles each way to work and home. An average commute would take 20 minutes to reach the city and at least another 20 minutes to cross the city to his parking lot near the Hudson River.

It wasn't long before the cross-town traffic and the monthly parking fee, nearly enough for a car payment, persuaded the author to use mass transit for the first time ever to get to work.

For 11 years, he rode public transportation including NJ Transit buses, Newark City Subway, Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, Port Authority Trans Hudson's PATH.

For five years, Buccino wrote about commuting and transit in metro New York-New Jersey for NJ.com. His transit blog on NJ.com earned the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award. Many of those blurbs are gathered in this collection.

Commuters who knew he wrote for NJ.com would seek him out and tell him their commuter tales of woe. Often they would simply commiserate and try to see who had a worse ride in that day. But more than once, Buccino was button-holed after a scathing piece on, say, homeless people's using Newark City Subway stairwells as toilets, and told that it was cleaned up within hours of his writing about it online.

For the most part, the items collected in "This Seat Taken?" are short, so readers and commuters can pick it up and read at random, or read as far as they can before their own stop. Then, it's easy to pick up where you left off or try pot-luck in the four sections of the book.

This collection is available in print and as an ebook because when he wasn't busy writing notes about his commute, Buccino was reading a newspaper, paperback or an ebook. "My first generation Kindle got me through a lot of long, long waits at the Port Authority Bus Terminal when no one from the bus company would tell us what was going on and the lines stretched down the halls, down the escalators and back out into the lobby," Buccino said.

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