Editor's Note: The Age of Limitations

There's a Wall Street broker who frequently takes the same train home from Manhattan that I do. Although I don't think the two of us have ever had a personal conversation, we have joined the types of discussions strangers have when daily routines get upended by some unexpected development.
The last such dialogue we shared took place on the evening of last month's blackout and it was triggered by the broker, who, after pocketing a lifeless cell phone, sat on the curb of Vanderbilt Avenue issuing prickly queries to passersby.
"Why don't they bring out some of their diesel trains?" he prodded, as he sat cleaning his eyeware. "What the heck is a grid? How are any of us going to get home?"
Nearly two years ago, I recall the same broker covered in white soot as he boarded the train. He sat with two people covered with the same ashen grime, and as the wheels began to turn beneath us the three men began to laugh loudly — their emotions running amok after having been cut loose from the horrors smoldering in lower Manhattan. Collectively, we savored the ordinary bump and rattle of the train on a day that was anything but ordinary.
The trains ran on September 11, 2001, but they did not run the night of August 14, 2003. And as the sun disappeared somewhere behind New Jersey, the broker stared upward at the sky's dimming canvas and clenched a fist. If not for the limitations of his arm's reach, you could imagine that he would have gladly punched a hole over Hoboken.