Some days, it does feel like another hundred people get off the train, some to stare, some to stay (in my way, naturally). I walked toward the Babcock St stop on Wednesday about 30 minutes before work, knowing that the train was too far ahead for me to catch up. A long red light held it indefinitely, and hope against hope, I decided to run for it. When I just hit the caboose, the light recanted, and the T blazed onward. Did I remain in the dust and patiently wait it out? I have been indoctrinated into city values now: patience is a virtue only when it's warm. I cut across moving cars to signal a bus, which arrived like a godsend. If this was the ride to heaven, though, God's gonna run out of room. But we were moving rapidly, so I endured the zombied faces around me, who never bothered to move out of the way of even a pregnant woman exiting, and the pungent odors that come with public transportation.
We passed the T I had missed around Boston U. Do I disembark and run for the train? I'll have to meet up with it at some point to get downtown. But in protest of the block-apart stops of the green B line, I continued to let the wheels go round and round. Another potential transfer point came, but I thought, we're almost at Kenmore. I might even make the T before the one I see.
The traffic light took nine minutes. Today, in comparison, it took two. Not only was the bus commune the smelliest but also the most dawdling. I race down the stairs, swipe my card through the turnstiles, and book it to the T... that I see pull away in front of me. A few minutes late; missing the T is always a viable excuse (if you don't overuse it). After an eternity, a T comes to save us, or so I think.
Instead, the driver announces with booming authority that this train will be taken out of service. The signs still read "Govt Center," and the masses inside are bemused. "Everyone off!" Two loaves of bread and fish could not have fed the multitudes that poured off the train, and all of them seemed to know each other. High schoolers, I overheard. Was this some twisted kind of field trip, exploring subterranean Boston? They were downright angry, as I would be if I had to share enclosed spaces with the lot of them. And I hadn't encountered so many racial epiphets since I'd read Huck Finn.
Next train comes; the herds pack in. I learn that the life of a sardine (really, the death of a sardine pre-consumption) is unbearably squished. That's when I hear from a girl literally beneath my armpit that they were deliberately evacuated from the train because they were being immature and pushing the buttons of both the T and the irate driver. I hate to stereotype, especially when we all poke at undergrads, but I'm now convinced that T licenses shouldn't be distributed until you can watch R-rated movies, buy cigarettes, and learn long words that don't begin with "mother."
We pull into the next stop, at Hynes, and more refugees stand on the platform like wayward immigrants rejected once they stepped off the boat. Sure enough, they're part of the same collective. I arrived at Emerson 45 minutes after my journey began.
Cities definitely bring out eccentricities. At New York Pizza last night, I swear a man told his woman (wife? mistress? "secretary"?) that she should get an abortion, just slipping it into conversation before immediately switching to the humdrum details of his perfunctory day. More outlandish, I found, was when his warm pastrami sandwich was delivered. The woman jumped up and hovered in the corner, saying she couldn't bear the smell of it. When he told her it was just cured beef, she looked incredulous. She consented to sit back down, but admonishing him the whole time, for the smell just wasn't right. I assume that she did not share the same public transportation this morning, or else that pastrami would smell like manna in comparison.
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