I love the train. Everyone is quiet, reading their books, listening to their iPods, eating their breakfast like I am. I claim the little seat that folds down by the staircase to the upper car. It's sort of tucked away so unless people were looking for you, they wouldn't hardly notice you were there. The conductors on the train are an interesting mix of Bostonians and people from Western Massachusetts, Worcester, Framingham, Marlborough. I wish I could spend a whole day's route with them and try to transcribe the pronunciations of each stop into phonetics. It's an exercise in Northeastern dialect, I tell you.
I eat my tupperware of oatmeal, drink my tea, read my New Yorker. It only takes twelve minutes to get into the city on the train. The subway takes about 40, and it's loud. I never realize how loud it is until I don't take it. Parents not minding their kids, people talking so loudly as if trying to leak information to the Washington Post from afar, at least four seats out of commission because of the leaking windows and the rainstorm that came in sideways.
Even at 9:30pm, when I have been singing for two hours, teaching German pronunciation to a large room of people who neither read nor speak German, and all I want to do is sit quietly, I cannot get a seat on the subway. So I perch on the stairs, leaning against the partition, one arm crooked around the pole, trying to remember to switch sides when we get to Kenmore because the doors open on the other side at Kenmore. And it dawns on me that there is a reason I love the commuter train. I have my own little seat, the loudest part of the experience is the clanging of the train's bell (that sounds like an overexuberant cow), and I can sit in my little corner and eat my oatmeal and drink my tea and watch the city go by.
Next week, I'm taking the train to NYC. Four hours of quiet time and space in which a person can work on their species counterpoint homework, read an 18th century treatise on keyboard playing, finish a good book and start another, knit, do crossword puzzles, and, as Depeche Mode reminded us to do back those so many days ago, enjoy the silence.
That said, I'm going to spend the rest of my afternoon on the sofa with my dog and my book. Hope everyone else's day is as peaceful as mine.
