SEPTEMBER 13, 2019 – A fortnight ago I’d bought online a NYC-Boston Amtrak ticket. The objective: to visit my sister Kristina and her husband, Dean. I’d received confirmation but hadn’t given it another look until . . . precisely 10:11 yesterday morning.
A week before I’d made flight arrangements—Minneapolis/St. Paul to LaGuardia—with the return flight leaving at high noon next Monday. I’d looked mindfully at that time, thus to remember it confidently.
The Amtrak leg of my journey was as critical as the rest. Visits with my Boston sister are brief and infrequent. She’d had a very narrow opportunity for my planned stay and its ambitious agenda. For my sister, timing of everything was critical. In this regard I’d paid more attention to the arrival time in Boston—3:11 p.m.—than to the departure time from New York.
In the course of frenetic missions in New York and New Jersey on Tuesday and Wednesday, the notion formed that the train to Boston departed at noon on Thursday. I figured if I left my “New York base camp”—the apartment of sister Jenny and her husband, GK—at 11:00, I’d have ample time to board my train before its noon departure from Penn Station.
At 10:10, while I was very casually attired, working away on my laptop, with coffee still warming the mug, two simultaneous synapses overwhelmed all other neurological activity inside my brain. First: what are the odds that noon would be the departure time of both my flight on Monday and my train ride on Thursday? Second: how in the world would any train run the distance in just 3 hours, 11 minutes?
It pays to question your assumptions—especially when you want to give yourself a heart attack.
My computer read “10:11 a.m.” when I opened my Amtrak confirmation email. “My train leaves at 11:00!” I said to Jenny.
“Don’t shower,” Jenny said with the voice of a crisis-counselor talking her charge off the ledge. “Just get dressed, pack your bags and go!” On the shower part, I compromised and splashed water all of my head . . . and the bathroom floor around the sink. Next I tore into my travel bag for fresh clothes and jump-forced myself into them. I then gathered up all my stuff that had previously escaped from said bag and crammed it back in. I bolted back into the living room, yanked my laptop power cord out of the socket and jammed it and my laptop into my briefcase.
Meanwhile, Jenny had checked the predicted time of an app-based car vs. subway from her apartment to Penn Station. Subway won by four minutes, leaving none to spare.
(To be continued.)
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
