Daniel Rubin: The suburbs: Where a columnist, if not buffalo, can roam

Last Thursday at the Starbucks in Lionville, a lady left her pocketbook on the table to go to the restroom. This to me was news.

I'm used to Philadelphia, not the outer limits of Chester County, where the open spaces seem to free people from clutching their handbags as if they were bulling through the line of scrimmage.

For the next several months, this child of the suburbs is going home. I'll be reporting my columns in the surrounding Pennsylvania counties, and what better method on my first day than to get lost?

I'd never heard of Lionville, and might have missed it had I not overshot my exit and wound up 14 miles farther down the Pennsylvania Turnpike than planned.

That the turnpike exits are numbered according to their distance from Ohio was another of my revelations this week as I put a couple hundred miles on my car, checking out complaints from SEPTA commuters and investigating the story of a 5-year-old and his wish for a water buffalo.

(Shouldn't the turnpike numbers run from east to west, the way the country was settled?)

Who knew, for instance, that the meter readers in West Chester are just as dead-eyed as their counterparts in Philadelphia? They pounced on my car in six minutes.

But here's a difference: If I challenged the ticket, at least the hearing room would have a toilet. That's a sore subject for Ted Gericke, the Center City pianist, who groused the other day that after waiting three hours to fight a ticket at Ninth and Filbert, he had been told the closest bathroom was in the Gallery.

"Not easy when you're 78 years old," he said. It took him 15 minutes to find one that was open. The Parking Authority told him there wasn't a restroom in the building because it didn't want drug addicts using it.

Don't think everything's easier in the 'burbs. Jonathan Hugg, a Center City litigator, invited me to spend the morning rush at the Narberth SEPTA station. He said people were so agitated that it reminded him of the scene in Doctor Zhivago in which angry, desperate people passed babies onto moving trains.

Monday morning, he waited about 45 minutes in the single-digit cold for the 7:44 to Suburban Station.

The train is nearly always late, he said, and three times a week, it's so packed he has to stand. If SEPTA has a problem, he said, it's not sharing it with riders.

SEPTA was concerned enough to put three execs on the phone with me, and they acknowledged a systemwide equipment shortage worsened by a succession of the most troubling sort of snowstorms.

Fresh powder is worse than ice or heavy snow, said Luther Diggs, SEPTA's assistant general manager. The wind whips the powder into the train engines, shorting the motors.

Four times this month, the train that's supposed to stop at Narberth at 7:44 a.m. has been canceled. And the other trains there have been on time only 75 percent of the time. The goal is 92 percent.

It's a problem, Diggs said, that won't really get better until new cars arrive the middle of next year.

Finally, my travels took me to the Aughe household in Springfield Township, Delaware County, to investigate reports that a preschooler was on a mission to buy a water buffalo.

Connor Aughe stood up before the congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Lansdowne on Sunday and announced he needed $250 so Heifer International could give a Philippines village an animal to provide milk and manure, and pull machinery to plant rice and potatoes. Already the boy has raised half the cash.

His mother, Shannon, had pushed for something more modest, maybe a flock of chicks for $20. Connor wasn't budging.

"They have horns," he said, showing me in his living room a picture of a hoofed beast. "They can go through the water. They love mud." Also, the villagers don't eat them as quickly as the chickens, which seemed a little gentler to Connor and his 8-year-old sister, Abby. I'm learning new stuff every day.

If there's a place or person you want to read about, drop me a line, OK?