Subway anecdote

It has been a rough week—and it’s only Thursday, things could still go wrong. My brother says that if you have an Xray to find out if your rib is broken and they say it isn’t, but later you fall off a bus and further injure the rib, you can go back and get another Xray and they won’t think you are scamming them for free Xrays because no one does that, but I have decided not to pursue it further for the time being. I can hear Mark in the other room packing up his laptop in a freight box to return to his now former employer because he got laid off on Tuesday. If Friday has new things in store, I don’t know if I want to know.

So I am up to very little in the way of newsletter posts today, but here is something that just happened on the subway that was pretty good.

Two teenaged boys got on, each with a milkshake. They were maybe 16 or 17, skinny but handsome with sandy hair all over the place hair. It took me a minute but I realized they were identical twins. Although it was easy to see that probably many of their classmates would have crushes on them and they were possibly co-captains of some major sports teams (volleyball? lacrosse? probably not hockey) they were also very obviously happy children, peach-faced and excited about their milkshakes on a freezing cold night. They were, each in their own way, absolutely inept at consuming the milkshakes. One of them quickly—I didn’t see how—got a quantity of milkshake all over the outside of the cup, his fingers, the cuff of his coat, and solved it somewhat by licking. I shudder to think what he touched previously on the University line. The other boy, more conservative, tried scooping his up with the straw. This was slow going and also somewhat messy but he seemed determined.

An elderly man with a scarf over his head, a 20 pack of Timbits and a thick accent was seated at right angles to this scene. He watched for a while, as I watched and possibly the whole car watched. Finally he motioned with his hand, the shape of a cup raised to the lips to drink. “Maybe try it like this?” The boys stared at him in wonder—they were both sticky and and vanilla-coated, but somehow this intervention was worse. They shook their heads politely and went back to their respective endeavours. It was when the man said, very kindly—he must have children, or now-grown children—”I have a spoon, do you want a spoon?” He did not produce this spoon, I don’t know if it was a ruse for surely those kids would not have taken it—and if they did, would he have had two?—but this finally jogged them into the realization that they were both unhygienic and a spectacle. Also the milkshakes were nearly gone anyway and they were slurping up dregs. They put the cups down on the floor, straighted up, gave their paws a final lick. The man tried to engage them a little more, “You are students, yes?” but it was still a no go. Too bad, he seemed nice.

<3

RR