My travels home for Spring Break began as they usually do. Running to the train and getting to 30th Street Station two hours early so I could eat my cinnamon pretzel sticks without fear of missing my train.
Fast forward to being on the Amtrak home and that’s where things started to get interesting. I managed to grab a window seat and had a lovely older woman sit down next to me. She pulls out an article on brain infections and I prepare to put in my headphones and nap for the duration of my trip.
About ten minutes into the train ride I watch an encounter that I can only say was straight out of a Rom Com. A handsome and mysterious man carrying a camo backpack asked a spunky red-head with glasses if the seat next to her was open. They begun with small talk and that’s when I discovered they had voices ten octaves higher than anyone else’s on the train and laughs ten times more annoying. My rom-com fantasy had turned into a nightmare.
Ten minutes pass of unnaturally loud conversation and the woman next to me starts to mumble under her breath and then starts to stare directly at the new couple- a dead stare showing no mercy. The pair begins to whisper and I am hopeful they had fear struck into them by my seatmate.
The entire ride was this man trying to impress the woman by telling her about his tour as a cook in Afghanistan, the perils of being a first respondent in 2003, and his amazing three-week trip to Ireland where he lived in luxury, accompanied with videos from Zero Dark Thirty which he compared to his tours and a full education on 22-caliber weapons.
The spunky redhead had stories of yoga with dogs, hot yoga, sunrise yoga (notice a pattern here?), etc. Then, out of nowhere my seat mate turns to me, following a rather obnoxious laugh from the ex-army guy, and says: “you know, I always tell people this is why it’s a good thing I don’t carry a gun.”
The rest of my ride was the two of us eavesdropping on the pair next to us and passing sly remarks about their totally stupid conversations. Highlights of her remarks include:
“Yes age is a number and hers is about 14…11.”
“Trust me honey if she does yoga with dogs she’s going to Manhattan.”
“He thinks he’s funny.” “And she thinks she’s an intellect.”
We spent the entire twenty minutes leading up to our arrival in Newark waiting to see if the mystery man would ask for her phone number. Because life is not a romantic comedy, he ultimately failed the test and didn’t ask for her number. My heart hurt for the woman but a sigh of relief swept over me as I realized they would no longer be able to annoy my new best friend and I.
Moral of the story here is if I had put in headphones immediately like I had planned on doing then I would have never made a new elderly friend from the Upper West Side and had the opportunity to sh*t talk an annoying couple next to us.
This one is for you, unnamed sassy elderly woman I befriended on the 42 Penn train home. Thanks for telling me to write this article, and for making a two-hour train ride exponentially more entertaining than I expected it to be.
