Riding the T

Here is a story I wrote back in grad school.  It's a slice of life from when I used to ride the T (subway/trolley) 3-4 hours a day to get to work and school.  It made me smile when I found it.

In the past year, I have spent an obscene number of hours on the T.  My most modest estimates put me at about 300 hours.  Sometimes it feels as if my permanent state has become a moderate twinge of motion sickness and a dull headache.

I’ve noticed many things over the months.  I’ve compared the faux leather seats of the orange line to their upholstered cousins on the red line.  I’ve noticed the metal handholds riveted to the crossbars and juxtaposed them with the plastic version, hanging more leisurely.  I’ve made mental notes on the narks riding the train, rating the “service” of the MBTA and the plethora of middle aged transvestites.  I’ve grieved for the homeless circulating from car to car fabricating stories to evoke just 5 more cents.

But today, I noted the walls and the floor of the T.  I have obviously stared at them unaware hours before, trying to avoid any unwanted eye contact.  But today I noticed them.  I noticed the plastic tack paper imitating wood that someone had adhered to the walls of the orange line.  I also paid close attention to the rust brick swirl of the linoleum floor.  Linoleum? I thought, like my kitchen?  How odd.  I assume that the pattern and color of the drab flooring was created with the same intention as dorm room carpeting- something that cloaks a nasty mess as unobtrusively as possible.  And to that end, the flooring of the T works pretty well.  The gum, lollypop sticks, and remnants of spilled soda blend pretty well. Perhaps too well.  

I remember riding the green line last year, and a woman kept throwing up.  Over and over she tossed the contents of her inners until there was only dark green bile splashing against the floor.  What struck me was that no one reacted.  Myself included.  Everyone needed to get to work, or get home, or get somewhere and so they set their face like flint and tried to ignore the sludge spreading across the floor.  

A solitary mother finally reacted.  She was getting off at Harvard Ave. She’d been out getting groceries. As she got up to leave she pulled her leeks from their plastic sheath and stuck them, naked, into her cloth “Please Recycle” bag.  She proceeded to hand the clear veggie bag to the poor girl, who could only nod before convulsing again into dry heaves. 

After a while, no one was on the train.  It was just me, riding the B-line to the end.  The heaving lady had even exited and I was left alone with the inanimate amoeba of bile.  I was shocked at how easy it would be for someone to enter the train unawares, and step into this nasty mess.  It had become part of the dingy flooring.  Only the smell betrayed its presence.

The train reached the end and I felt that I had to inform someone.  I walked to the front and tugged on the conductor’s sleeve. “Excuse me,” How did I say this politely?  “I think a woman back there vomited on the floor.”  All decorum had to be scrapped as the man indicated he did not speak English.  I was reduced to awkward reenactments of the scene and finally just led him to the mush.  “Oh” he said and shrugged.  It seemed normal enough to him.  Health hazards were all in a day’s work I guess.  So, he nodded a dismissal and I walked away.

James River Crab Cakes

Dear  Editors (and readers) ,

  This is my first submission ever to a literary publication.  I stumbled upon Glimmer Train and found helpful, hopeful writing and inspiration.  Thank you. -K.D.  (I have only included the first paragraph since I think that is the most important paragraph of a story.  If you want to read more, let me know, maybe I will post the rest in installments.)

Everybody on the James River called my daddy “Rooster.”   Mr. Williams, the foreman down at the shipyard, gave him the name years ago and it stuck.  My daddy never much cared for the name though and I had a mind to find out why.  Only clue I could get was that it had to do with a prize fighting cock my daddy killed a long time ago, back before I was born. 

"Geography is destiny"

This quotation was given to me by one of my favorite writing teachers.  I have thought about it a great deal and continue to wrestle with it.  

Perhaps geography is destiny.  I mean, it makes sense. Geography touches every sense.  It influences our food, music, scenery, climate, and physicality.   However, I am reluctant to embrace the idea wholesale because the cliche that we make our own destiny is ingrained so  deeply within me.

I grew up in New England (emphasis on England.)  My grandmother immigrated from the UK when she was four years old.  A short time later, her father drowned, leaving her, her brothers and her mother with the farm here in the States.  Clinging to her traditional British maxims, she managed to keep a stiff upper lip and weave her culture deep into the fabric of our family.

I grew up in a dying factory town.  We lived on a lake, and that, I have no doubt, formed my identity in ways I can never convey.  The pink sunsets over the soft peak of ripples helped me understand my mom’s quiet strength.  I have drawn inspiration from the spectrum of blues ranging from the depths of the lake to the velvet surface of  the sky.

We were in the town because my mother rebelled against her parents, married my father and was threatened with disinheritance.  Yet, even this schism did not divide her from her sense of British propriety and pride .  We were broke but we were never poor. And when I turned 12 years old we came into a great deal of money. I was therefore free to roam from this small rural town.  

My parents wanted me to go to college and I certainly had the desire.  I made up for my lack of looks with my abundance of brains.  The only instructions my parents gave me was that I could go anywhere but California.  

I had no thoughts of going to California, there was every reason not to go- earthquakes, fires, landslides.  No, my mind was full of my dad’s childhood in South Florida and my grandfather’s riverfront house in Virginia.  Princeton, William and Mary, James Madison were on my mind and in that order. 

I had no idea I was destined for California- but the allure of the opposite ocean drew me away from all of my plans.  

I went because I could breath out there.  I could walk on the beach for hours and no one would ask me where I had been.  I could climb up into the mountains and feel the dangerous breath of the sun.  

I went because I wanted to be alone. I wanted to experience a personal gold rush, pursuing my dreams of education and vocation, carving out a life for myself in the face of the Santa Ynez Mountains. 

Instead I fell in love and discovered grace.

In my case, I’d say that even geography could not keep me from my destiny.  I was born 3,000 miles away from the man I came to love more than my own life.  I lived my life, marred by suffering and sin,  an infinite distance from my saving grace but I believe that  my story certainly was mapped out before I was born.  The significance of each longitudinal point and every latitudinal mark was designed before time.  I can only hope to sort out some of the journey as I write.

So I put it to you, “Geography is destiny.”  

Do you agree?