Travel Day

Big travel day today. Makes me want to go in to the train station and sit at one of those tiny tables with the wire mesh tops because when you do this people feel they can come join you. There aren’t many seats and why should YOU be hogging an empty one and you not even going anywhere?An old lady sat with me once. It was maybe 1:00 pm. “Am I late?” she asked. “My train leaves at 5:25!” Once a guy sat down and said he was feeling sick. Turned out he’d been doing drugs the whole previous day and night. We  drank our Snapples and looked up at all the airy light you can still see now, same as in 1908 when the place first opened. And once a man in a suit leaned in and told me he liked the satin stripe down the side of my pants.They were tuxedo pants and remembering them now makes me think of my teaching days and 16-year old Barbra. This was back in '74, long enough ago so that as a lesbian she was about the first openly gay teen most any of us had ever known. She had quit school by the time I met her but she showed up a lot anyway. She would sit in the back of my English classes and  just listen, and the following Spring she went to the prom in a tux.As it happens I ran the prom that year and that night the principal called me over.  “What is that young woman's status?” he asked me somber-faced. “She’s a girl at her prom,” was  all I could think to say. That summer when she enlisted, we drove past lovely  South Station for her induction at the Army Base. Then, her status was Private First Class. And now? Well now she’s a Molecular Biologist and one of the deans at UCSD. And to think I wouldn't even know her today if she hadn’t had that nice train-station openness and come into my class one day to say hi!