2005-04-16 - 2:41 p.m.
Yesterday I took the train from Providence to Boston to get a chemotherapy infusion. Much to my surprise, it turns out that chemotherapy is now used to treat a lot of stuff other than cancer, like MS and even AIDS. I don�t really understand the details of the process, but my white blood cells are mistakenly attacking me, so thinning them out is a good thing. I don�t get it as hardcore as a cancer patient, but it still sucks. I feel pretty sick by afternoon and my friend gives me a ride home.
Anyway, I was thinking about the train trip. I used to do it in reverse every day last year, living in Boston and going to school in Providence. (Actually, I guess I worked my class schedule so I only had to go in Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.) But another city, another state. It was over an hour and a half each way, usually almost 100 minutes. If the train was delayed (usually on the way back) or if I slept through my stop at Back Bay station (again on the way back; Providence is the end of the line) it could be two hours or more.
I would get up by 5 to catch a 6:22 bus from around the corner to Copley Square and walk the three blocks to Back Bay station. In the winter it was dark until well into my train ride and I�d catch morning magic hour going through southern Massachusetts. There�s no way I could ever do this the way I am now. I�m glad I did it when I could. Honestly, the train part wasn�t bad. I could read or take a nap. And the trip was worth every minute because it meant I could live with Alithea. (Whether she actually appreciated this effort is unclear, but whatever.)
Relatively few people make the early reverse commute all the way from Boston to Providence and we mostly knew each other by sight. I was quite taken by the determination of one little girl whose grandma would take her all the way to Providence to go to a Catholic school. Mom didn�t live with them and I got the feeling was out of the picture for less-than-pleasant reasons. I offered to give Grandma a break one day a week by escorting her myself, since I was going in anyway. I could remember my own commute to school across Brooklyn when I was not much older, not nearly as long but still arduous. The girl eventually relocated to Providence, where I hope she�s happy and doing well.
There was one fellow commuter I was pretty smitten by. She often passed out asleep across her seat and had to be jostled awake when we got to Providence. I thought she was so beautiful. She was very young-looking and always impeccably dressed. I constructed a whole life for her in my mind. She was 20, had never gone to college, but was real smart and had gotten a well-paid job in Providence, which is why she dressed up so and took the early train. Yeah.
On the last day of fall semester I thought gee, I should really say something. When we got out in Providence I waited for her. �Hey my schedule�s going to change soon and I probably won�t always take this early train. I have a long-term girlfriend and I�m sure she wouldn�t appreciate me saying this, but I just want you to know that, well� you�re always so pretty.�
She seemed quite flabbergasted and thanked me in astonishment. I guess it was sort of like sprinkling pixie dust. She went to leave and I sat down at the station caf� to get a cup of coffee. After a few minutes she came back in and sat down across from me. �Okay, I have to know now why you take the early train to Providence.�
I was sort of shocked that she was even talking to me, but I explained about going to Brown as an older student and living in Boston with my girlfriend. She told me her deal. Of course, I had her life entirely wrong. She was a lawyer, a recent BC Law grad who was doing a clerkship with a judge in Providence. She was only a few years younger than me, was Jewish, and had grown up in Brooklyn only a few miles from me. I suppose she was just the kind of girl my parents would want me to be with. Ah well.
I saw her sometimes spring semester and we�d talk. It turned out she was a bit of a flake, which made her a lot less attractive. (I still got jealous, in a way I knew I had no right to be, when I saw her kissing her boyfriend at the station.) But we talked about hunger, drive, and how there were frighteningly parochial people we�d grown up with who still rarely left Brooklyn or even their little neighborhood.
She was real nice when I started using a cane and sympathetic when Alithea broke up with me at the end of the semester. I did ask her to lunch, just as friends, but she was swamped with work. I wonder where she is now. She didn�t have a job lined up for the next year when I knew her.
Although I think of BC Law as just all that (indeed, in Boston the highest academic credentials you can have may be the townie pride of the Triple Crown � BC High, Boston College, BC Law), she said she was sort of in this intermediate limbo. She was lower half of the class at a non-top ten law school and couldn�t successfully compete with grads of more prestigious schools for jobs at upper-tier firms. And she was too proud to like work in an office over a video store. She wanted to do public interest law, but those jobs are oddly even more competitive than corporate stuff.
So I hope she did work something out and I hope she�s happy wherever she is. She remains the prettiest girl I�ve ever met on a train.
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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