Guest Post #2: The 10:50 to Pittsburgh

Sarah's some kind of sibling, one of those people who you meet in adulthood and think "we were sisters in another life". There are eerie coincidences in our lives: our mothers were similar, we married a day apart and had the same lemon-buttercream-with-raspberry-filling cake, and we're both children of divorce. She's been to my house; we've communed in New York City, by phone, at BlogHer. For now, she's hung up her blogging hat - but she's still in my reader because I know that a post will pop up one day.

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The 10:50 to Pittsburgh

The train pulled away from Penn Station not long ago. It’s just rising up and out of the tunnel into August’s haze when the conductor announces that he’ll be collecting tickets shortly. His voice is so obviously weary. A black man in his seventies with a more-salt-than-pepper beard, he looks too frail to be doing this job. He should have retired by now, but I imagine that life has not treated him well enough to allow him to rest in any sort of sustained way. Other passengers must sense what I do, because they forsake mere politeness for the nervous, friendly chatter that often overtakes people visiting hospital patients. “Good morning!,” my seatmate says brightly to the conductor as he tears off the receipt from her ticket. He nods in acknowledgment but offers her nothing more. She looks disappointed. I think that she must come from a small town where there aren’t many blacks, that she may have been hoping for affirmation of her enlightened attitude towards races other than her own. She got none.

I haven’t been on a train in years. The last time I traveled by rail was when I was still a student. Those rides were heady, suffused with the energy of new relationships, amorous or otherwise, and the expectant hope and reckless candor afforded by alcohol. Once, when I was riding a different train, one heading east, not west like this one, a boy in my Poli Sci class massaged my hand for a good long while. Back then, everything was infused with eroticism, even when it wasn’t.

One of the truths of being in my forties is that I am as invisible as I care to be. This wasn’t so in my twenties, and most of the time I relish the freedom I have now to watch my fellow passengers and guess at their stories. Everyone has a story, I counseled my eight-year-old son the other day. He’d been complaining that his life wasn’t very exciting, at least not to an outsider. I added, You just haven’t discovered yours yet. He looked skeptical. So I proceeded to tell him my story of him, which of course had little to do with his story of himself. Still. His eyes widened as I talked. When I concluded my little tale, I heard him sigh with satisfaction. You made me sound interesting, he said, a smile curving one corner of his mouth. I liked that.

But it’s not a secret. Everyone’s interesting. In the row behind me sits a businessman. He’s been abusing his cell phone on this trip. He’s from Scotland, I suspect, and his accent is truly lovely. I haven’t seen his face, and I don’t think I’ll turn around to investigate its contours. It’s enough for me to listen to the music his larynx is making.

In front of me is an elderly woman, and she is perched stiffly, properly, a lady even here on a train. She smells of rosewater-scented powder. She is describing her grown children to her captive seatmate. My youngest, she confides, is the strong one. She’s the one I worry least about, she’s the one I share all the secrets with. I wonder about her youngest, who may well be close to my age. Does she mind her mother’s perception of her? Is it a burden? Does she wish sometimes that she weren’t so strong? Is she even strong, or did her mother simply assign her the role?

By now the conductor is nearing the back end of the car I’m riding. I’d like to make my way over to him, place my hand on his arm, offer him my seat, tell him that I’ll walk up and down the aisles collecting people’s tickets, and their stories, too, add that I’ll come back to him, after, and place all the stories in his lap for his perusal, once he’s napped awhile.

And when he’s good and ready, I’ll collect his story, and I’ll take all its adjectives of hurt and verbs of pain and punch holes in them until each incident, each wrong he may have experienced, is no more to him than the paper confetti so insubstantial that I don’t mind leaving it scattered about on the floor of the Pennsylvanian #43 bound for Pittsburgh.