Strainge Things

Yesterday I found myself on a platform on the Blue Line (Market / Frankford). It happens a few times every year, unusual but not unheard of. What was out of the ordinary was the young Asian woman who walked up to me and handed me the earpiece of her cell phone and urgently gestured for me to put it in my ear. Surprise overwhelmed germophobia so I stuck the piece in my ear and said "Hello?" A woman on the other end said the woman whose phone I was on needed to go to a particular station. "She is at that station," I said. The woman who owned the phone nodded and took it back from me. She put it in her ear and went off talking in a language I didn't recognize (I can spot Japanese and Thai; above and beyond that I'm clueless).

Today, on another train, going in a completely different direction, I sat in the same car as a trio, an older woman and two men, who appear to be just passing out of the category of "young men" into just "men," if that makes sense (late 20's, early 30's). (There is an entire passage in one of Thomas Hardy's novels on this division, but I forget which book it is in and have digressed enough already.) They were talking religion, Catholicism to be exact, and the woman would lose herself in thought and begin praying or praising aloud. She said it would be wonderful if all the world leaders would raise a yellow rose to the sun and then broke into a song about the Yellow Rose of Peace. It was not objectionably loud, though I could hear it half a car away, and was a lovely song. All the same, you don't often get seranaded on SEPTA.

Years ago, when I was cobbling together a living from two or three part-time jobs, I went to Washington D.C. a couple of days a week for a few months. Usually I took the unreserved Amtrak train. Once or twice the timing of things made the expense of the Metroliner worth the time saved. On one of those trips the train conductor read us poetry, "The Road Less Traveled," by Robert Frost. I wondered if we just had an exceptional conductor that day or if that is the sort of thing that always happened on the Metroliner, a "how the other half lives" feature. I'm still not sure.