Author’s note: For 10 months I traveled to work in New York City from my home in southeastern Connecticut. Notice I used the word “traveled” and not “commuted.” The difference, to me, is mileage and duration. My daily “commute” was three hours each way, including a 45-minute drive, an hour-and-40-minute train ride, and subway rides across and uptown. Occasionally, I took notes on the people sitting around me on the train. What follows are the fourth and fifth of several stream-of-consciousness entries I made in an untitled journal.

Monday, July 28, 2008

I appreciate each and every person who passes. Apparently there is a more appealing seat than any of the three surrounding me.

I’m sitting in a four-seat configuration, two facing our eventual destination, their counterparts facing (once we get under way) from whence we came.

A middle-aged woman just sat down catty-corner to me leaving the seat directly across from me, and the one immediately to my right, empty. This train is scheduled to depart in two minutes. Between now and then, I am sure that someone will ruin the relatively comfortable conditions in which I’m sitting.

One minute.

It is 5:38 p.m. We are supposed to be moving but are not.

“Last call,” the conductor just announced. This was followed by an electronic bell announcing that the doors are closing, which they are not.

It is 5:39 p.m. The conductor just sounded a horn signaling something imminent. People are still walking onto the train.

The bell again. It is 5:40 p.m. The doors are closed but people are still walking from car to car looking for a seat. I’m still not confident that I’ll have the pleasure of legroom and elbowroom. We’re still not moving. I needn’t point out that if I were the conductor we’d have departed on time.

It is 5:42 p.m. We are now moving.

And now we’ve stopped. There had better not be a medical emergency such as happens with some regularity on the subways.

It is 5:44 p.m. We are sitting on the tracks, waiting for … who knows. It is 5:45 p.m. We are moving again, though not nearly fast enough for me.

Aside from the creaking and squeaking of the train, the low rumble of its wheels, the only sound in the car in which I’m riding is a conversation, across the aisle, between an Asian mother and daughter.

The middle-aged woman sitting in the seat catty-corner to mine is wearing a black dress with white polka dots and a black sweater, open at the front, its sleeves riding up her forearms. Her fingernails have what is called a French manicure, glossy, their tips painted an off-white hue. Her toenails are painted hot pink. She is wearing two rings, either white gold or sterling silver, on the pinkie of her right hand. Around her neck she is wearing a thin silver chain on which hangs a circle, about an inch in diameter, of diamonds. On her right ring finger she is wearing an engagement ring and a wedding band, both of which are studded with diamonds. She is also wearing a bracelet on her right wrist that complements the other jewels she is wearing, including earrings that match her necklace and a nice watch.

Her purse is a bit longer than a football but no wider in circumference. It is made of leather and is lime green. I have seen this particular make and model, if that is how one refers to such accessories. I feel strangely confident that it was designed by Kate Spade.

On the woman’s lap is a black, soft leather briefcase, on top of which she has positioned a small Panasonic DVD player. It resembles a miniature desktop computer. Her headphones are plugged into the DVD player.

“Did the fence guy come?” she wants to know from whomever she’s talking to on her cell phone. I didn’t get a feeling either way.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

We the many who commute to work each day on these godforsaken trains are a compassionate bunch. No sooner did I settle into a window seat than a woman several rows behind me, over my left shoulder on the opposite side of the aisle, began coughing incessantly, a dry, sharp barking without pause that must have been just what the person who’d chosen to sit next to her was looking forward to after a long day in the city.

Fortunately, the woman has stopped her hacking. It would have driven me insane had it continued. I cannot imagine what sitting next to that racket, that discharge of germs, would have been like. I’d have relocated. I’m sure of it. And I’d not have veiled my disgust. I am into self-preservation.

Why wouldn’t someone in the middle of a coughing or sneezing fit volunteer to sit in the restroom?

As if to spite me, she’s just resumed coughing, which means that she’s still alive, which is more than one can say about the woman who was struck by a Shore Line East train earlier this afternoon. For 90 minutes, her death caused a disruption in rail service in New Haven.

“Such compassionate people we are,” I said to the woman sitting across from me. She’d gotten a phone call about the woman’s death and had casually said she might have to get off in Milford. Fortunately, normal train service had resumed in New Haven. Had it not, I would have been forced to get off in Milford and take a taxi the rest of the way.

Riding on a commuter train and learning that there might be a delay in your arrival at your destination is like working in a newspaper newsroom from 5 p.m. to midnight and hearing, “Shots fired,” come across the police scanner at 11:50 p.m.

“Oh that’s just fucking great,” I’d say, turning up the volume to hear the details. “It never, ever fucking fails. … No one can ever get shot at 7:30. It’s always just when I’m getting ready to head home. … Assholes.”

We are making our first stop. Fairfield. The Cougher’s stop. Thank god. She is gone, though I’m sure the germs she emitted like a sputtering exhaust remain.

I’m trying to imagine what my mood would be like right now had I been sitting next to her, and had the train conductor informed us that, due to an “incident” or “accident” on the tracks in New Haven, the train’s last stop would be Milford. It is, in some interesting way, something I almost wish would happen. What will it be like when I snap? I think about being in a small anger management group in which a psychiatrist is asking us in a careful yet authoritative voice to “share.”

I must interrupt that thought to say that a fat, bespectacled man sitting across the aisle from me has just decided to express the rhythms in his head by drumming, with an empty water bottle, on his knee. And the woman sitting across from me has decided, with two stops and less than half an hour to go, that now is the time to eat the New England-style clam chowder she brought with her. It is as if she is completely comfortable on the train and enjoys this part of her day. I’ve sat near her before. She’s always talking with the conductors, knows all their names, and is always in a good mood. She wouldn’t have been bothered by having to get off in Milford. Things could be worse, she figures.

Really? How? She said herself that her dogs wouldn’t care a lick if some woman got run over by a train as long as it didn’t prevent Mom from getting home to let them out at the regular time. Pets before people. Has a nice ring to it, like an organization whose mission is to serve that very philosophy, an organization I should start to complement Fewer Humans.

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