Tuesday February 1, 2005, 6:02pm
Tuesday February 1, 2005, 6:02pm
About five minute prior to its scheduled departure the train that became the 6:05pm Worcester Express pulled into South Station. The waiting horde has done a great job of transforming this ghost assemblage, complete with conducting announcements and nearly 800 soon-to-be-traveling souls. With a single blast from the locomotive we are underway no more than 30 seconds off the mark.
At a distance of perhaps twenty yards I see another departing train veering south to follow the seacoast. I wouldn’t have noticed at all except for how six faint running lights are keeping pace with us as they slowly drift away.
The dingy green pall of Back Bay is an improvement only in how the near total blackness has been replaced by the moving silhouettes of black coats and black hats and black briefcases – no matter their truer colors.
The daytime, so much enjoyed on my three previous train rides full of fresh hope for spring just around the corner has been overwritten.
I’ll be visiting my mom again tonight, though not in the hurry-up fashion of yesterday. All choices are like this – whether to hurry, or wait, whether to do something one way or another. Sometimes I make uniformed choices and marvel at how I could have done so well. Other times I wonder in equal measure at how I could have been so wrong with far more effort.
Many times I might later notice how I had a better choice leading to a better result, yet instead of starting over I usually decide to deal with my original decision in the hope that this can be made good enough. I have found that no matter the current score, like a round of golf, starting over from scratch is rarely worth the total penalty.
Less than clear-cut choices are the hardest. Easy choices need little justification, and I can pretty easily abandon a noticeably bad choice early enough to leave the work unfinished. Yet the middle ground choices are a struggle because I rarely see the most serious problems until I’ve been at something for a while. By then, with so much invested, how can I justifiably quit?
Those are the sorts of choices that put businesses out business, and people wondering what to do next now that they’ve wasted a good portion of their lives and livelihood.
Through Natick Station we lurch over uneven rails. Without the racket I might not have noticed. Then – with no time to contemplate this further – out of the implacable darkness a speeding train roars past my window too fast to be distinguishable beyond a rushing blur of cabin lighting.
Two hundred fifty tons of moving steel, glass, aluminum and humanity passes in one giant slug just three feet south of my shoulder, and with a final whoosh and roar from its trailing locomotive – the signature of an inbound MBTA commuter – the other train is gone in two seconds flat start to finish.
At Framingham once again level with the surrounding terrain, I am noticing individual headlights and taillights and spotty parking lot lights from passing shopping plazas. For a moment I consider how this is the world I know best.
Soon on approach to Ashland Station we pass the old Telechron clock factory complex at the edge of town and in the last mile before my final station stop this evening, as the engineer eases the throttle, we drift alongside ancient industrial buildings great and small. Most by now have been transformed like the old clock-making complex to other uses – including a church right next to the station converted from a huge rail depot long-abandoned and ready for its own sort of salvation.
Most of this arises from memory and I won’t see much for real until tomorrow morning when the sun returns to bring with it another day and who knows what perils and satisfactions.
