Thursday, October 14, 2004, 8:18am
Thursday, October 14, 2004, 8:18am
From Ashland Station a four-pack of lawyers climbs aboard this morning’s 8:07 train and after a five-minute binge of backslapping banter they’ve settled into quieter tones. One of the guys has been riding this train most mornings lately and he’ll either act upbeat with his friends or when traveling alone sit slump-shouldered like a lost puppy – especially when one particular younger woman is absent from the party. Alone atop the Ashland platform he’ll trudge a few dozen yards, turning back to see if she’s trailing through the parking lot, then walk some more and turn again. And if she does show up, he’ll amble and skip along side-by-side puppy-dog style with his entire attention hanging on her every word and gesture.
I refer to him as Mr. Puppy Dog and over the months I’ve collected quite a few nicknames like this – not because of any tendency to label people, rather because the commute puts me in passing contact with a number of familiar faces, and it’s just a matter of human nature to attach a name to a nameless face – even if an invented moniker.
Let me see… there’s Mr. Hat, a younger guy who wears a baseball cap year round to hide a bald spot, and The Nurse who probably isn’t a nurse, but somehow seems like how a nurse might look on her way to work.
Some labels are less than flattering – like Ms. Mileage, a moderately overweight mid-thirties woman tightly dressed in a throw-back to her skinnier high-school-kid days – strutting the platforms and carriage aisles of the MBTA as though somebody should be noticing something positive – whereas the direct opposite is inescapably obvious.
There are those I don’t see anymore – Ms. Speedy who after the train each evening pumped her arms and hoofed nearly twice as fast as any normal human. Walking at Boston city sidewalk speeds myself – even still she’d overtake me along Pleasant Street so suddenly that I’d sometimes yelp in surprise.
Then there was Mr. Zippo who wasn’t particularly fast except in a small crowd of would-be passengers boarding a train, where he’d deftly muscle his way through like a football running back slipping past the quick and the dead.
I don’t stand around inventing labels. One day I’ll simply hear myself saying something like “there goes Ms. Glacial” – a recent addition in the form of a slow-motion Asian woman taking one step every few seconds while reading her morning newspaper all the way up, through, and down the crossover tower.
Monikers aside, rail construction has advanced quickly west-to-east all the way through downtown Ashland like a mechanized storm. New ties I once saw piled at Ashland Station in the space between north and south rails are gone, yet the major rip-up and replacement I’d imagined has not taken place. The original rails remain, still welded in one continuous strip with most of the older ties half-buried in crushed basalt. It seems the whole project has been to replace the worst of the ties, adjust the gauge between rails and then re-spike the hardware into place. I should have known the old steel would stay since days beforehand quarter-mile rail segments would have been welded and laid alongside the roadbed in preparation – and I saw none of that.
Today I have another trip to the post office, this time to mail a vintage (as in bloody old) ILEX #4 camera shutter for cleaning and adjusting to S.K. Grimes of Woonsocket, Rhode Island – speaking of monikers – a great name for that place. Yesterday I checked on insurance for the package sent to England that never arrived – a five-dollar item that cost 36 bucks to mail. It turns out that insurance only covers the item itself – not the postage. So the two bucks I paid for coverage was mostly a waste. Instead of making an insurance claim for five dollars, I’ve sent the guy a Paypal refund, and if the turntable ever resurfaces, I’ve also asked him to pay me once again.
Leaking through open vestibule doors the outside air reminds me of a well-noticed happenstance felt many mornings this time of year… a sunny brisk day rising from the chilly mid-40s in Ashland into the much more pleasant 50s here by the still-warm sea.
“South Station, last and final stop. South Station.”
