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dixonspeaker-blog · 7 years

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Leaving in 20

A younger version of myself would have told you it was my mother who caused it. She texted early on Monday asking me to call her. I thought she wanted to recap the weekend. Liz came with me to my parents’ house for the first time. My mom did get in a few brief words about the weekend but those were poorly disguised softeners to the true intent behind her call, and she is a damn fool if she thought I would be tricked by this attempt. I’ve known her my whole life. The real reason for her call was predicated upon what almost all of our calls are predicated upon. The insatiable need to harp on me. This call was dedicated to my health. A recent biometric screening, my first ever actually, had delivered empirical results stating that my cholesterol was “a bit high,” and I was foolish enough to let this information slip over pre-dinner drinks on Friday night. I imagine my mother hearing this news while watching my body transform into my father’s body right before her eyes. In her text that morning she did ask me to call her, but when I did, it began with her incredulous to the fact that I had called so early. I figured you would still be asleep she told me. You need to make sure you are getting enough sleep, she said. She had noticed bags under my eyes that weekend. I needed to make sure I was taking care of myself while I was on the road. My efficient, young-man genetics weren’t going to be around my whole life to bail me out. Look at my father. Could I receive packages at my house? Yes, I lived in a city not a conflict-zone. Good. She was going to be sending some type of pill for me to take. They are a natural substance that will help with my cholesterol. I told her okay and if she sent them I would take them. The conversation was ending. She said text me where you are staying when you’re in Chile so I know where to send the cadaver dogs. This is an absolute favorite saying of hers. That’s three weeks away, I said, I’ll talk to you before that. I love you too. Bye bye. When we got off the phone she had accomplished her mission objective, and I thought way more about all of my meals for the rest of the day than I would have liked. And then, and for this I have no one but myself to blame, I let this sensation of feeling awkward, of feeling slightly off track, to linger inside of me and carry over into the following day. And that is where we are now. . . . Due to an aggressive travel schedule, I had not traveled out to my office in weeks. By this point any semblance of routine was completely decimated, sailing off somewhere beyond the rings of Saturn. I am, if anything, someone who travels from A to B to C by relying on a series of routines. I like systems, I like logical organizations, and I certainly like my carefully thought out routines. In the absence of these things I trend towards forgetfulness. I woke up feeling like my mom said I looked. I felt the bags under my eyes as well. I don’t know what they felt like exactly but I felt them nonetheless. While still in bed I took my phone and looked at a picture of myself from the weekend and saw the bags there too. I pondered the possibility that they would remain there for the rest of my life. I closed my phone and got out of bed. These were all of the things that happened after that: I went into the bathroom and had an unsatisfying bowel movement. I got into the shower and found my bottle of body wash empty, so I tossed it into the wastebasket that still had no bag lining it because both my roommate and myself are lazy. It added to the growing pile of Q-tips, tissues, and dental floss that one of us would eventually have to fish out by hand. I grabbed another bottle of wash from the bottom drawer, which I only found after opening every other drawer. This extended search caused tremendous amounts of water to drip onto the floor. I left the bathroom without combing my hair, giving me the sensation of being clean and finely groomed only to find out this was not the case, adding to the sense of foolishness and discomfort that I was already feeling. I chose a shirt that was too small making it difficult to tie my shoes. This difficulty lead to not leaving enough lace on my left shoe to double knot them, something I have to do or else the whole thing will come undone right as I’m about to enter or exit the subway. It was as I bent over this shoe that I noticed something that would throw the rest of my day off its axis entirely. Before each business trip I always do two things. I pack my suitcase the night before, and I plan my wardrobe around my shoes. For this trip I decided to wear my new camel-shaded light brown shoes. I bought them in December. They’re the type of shoe hip, young, business professionals were wearing and they were the first pair I’ve purchased in this style. I bent over and noticed that the rubber sole of the shoe was beginning to peel off by the toe. Despite knowing next to nothing about shoes, I was certain this peel would be impossible to repair. The only solution was to promptly slam dunk them into the garbage. This discovery caused the universe to rearrange itself around me in such a way that I seriously considered choosing a new set of shoes for the trip, even if this meant having to up end and repack my entire suitcase on the spot. In the end I decided to do my best to ignore the deformity and wear them anyway. Part of me hoped it would become worse throughout my travels, adding punctuation to my growing misery. I grabbed my wallet, watch, keys, left the room, realized I had forgotten my phone and water bottle, went back to get them, grabbed my coat, and headed downstairs. My roommate was standing in the living room so we left together. I took the subway to Suburban, became impossibly thirsty, and reached for my Hydro Flask water bottle that I kept with me at all times and was absolutely essential for any business trip where I would be presenting. I discovered that I had left it at counter. F--k. I made the train just in time, but that meant not being able to get a coffee. I spent the train ride tired, thirsty, and confused. . . . Once in the office I was able to re-center myself. Things were back in order. I was able to make sense of what was in front of me. Accomplishing work, no matter how mundane, always has that effect. I like to check off boxes. I ate some breakfast, booked a shuttle to take me from the office back to the regional rail station later that day, and settled into a nice flow of creating presentations and firing off emails. Exactly what I wanted to do. At noon I had lunch with my boss. At 1:50 I began packing up my things and at 2:00 I was standing on the curb ready to be picked up. Five minutes passed and the shuttle still had not arrived. They were typically very prompt. I turned to go inside and as I was turning I remembered something, and this act of remembering came upon me like a large dark cloud moving quickly across the sky to block out the sun. Shuttles from my office to the train station could only be booked at 10 minutes to the hour or 20 minutes after the hour. These are the increments, odd as they are. The shuttle booker was explicit about this, repeating herself several times as I undoubtedly half-listened while performing other tasks. I knew at this moment the shuttle had passed and was not coming back. I asked the man at the security desk what I should do, and immediately regretted doing so because I knew I wasn’t going to like the answer. And I didn’t. He told me to call the shuttles again, which I did, and they told me they couldn’t send any over. They couldn’t have said this with less care. My options were now to either march upstairs and ask my boss’s boss for a ride, or call for a Lyft and hope they could get through security, pick me up, and get me to the train station all within the next 20 minutes. I called the Lyft. A serious fear was beginning to crawl over me. My phone vibrated and showed me that the driver was 10 minutes away and driving in the opposite direction on the nearby highway. Nice. He kept going, making it clear that he was pulling the trick where you simply drive farther and farther away from the pick up point and wait for the requester to cancel, which I did. Precious time was lost. My throat tightened even more. I called another Lyft, which I knew at this point had no shot of getting me there on time. He was 6 minutes away, but got to me even quicker. Remarkable. I directed him through campus and expressed to him the urgency of speed. He was certain we would get there on time and chatted with me calmly as drivers will often do. He was right, and we got to the station with minutes to spare. On the train I threw my suitcase onto the overhead rack and pulled out my Borges. I began to fall asleep. I had been riding the regional rail to and from my office for well over a year now, and there was a time when half-sleeping during the journey and waking up just as the train pulled into my station was a daily habit. Then, about a month ago, I was tired enough to fall into a very deep sleep and missed my stop. I haven’t let myself sleep on a train since. So I tried my best to stay awake, reading the same sentence of my Borges over and over again, taking breaks to look at the trees quickly moving by. The landscape between the last stop on the R5 and 30th Street Station is extremely barren. There are a few homes but mostly dirt and waste. I had only read a page or two of my Borges because of how tired I was. This always left me annoyed. I occupied my mind by thinking about the large Dunkin Donuts coffee I was going to get at the station. When the train reached the platform I gathered my backpack and coat and rushed off. I had only 25 minutes until my Amtrak to Connecticut. The platform was busy so I had to weave around people to get to the stairs. And it was as I reached the stairs that that black cloud rushed back in from what seemed like out of nowhere but I now realize was just off in the distance.

…I left my suitcase in the overhead rack…

I whipped around and sprinted back towards the train, but the doors were already closed. I saw the dead eyes of the ticket-taker through the window. He shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly and turned away from me as the train pulled out. I allowed myself 5 seconds of internal rage, a napalm flash setting fire across my brain. I had no choice but to think quickly. I scanned the moving train for identifying markers. The sign said Doylestown. I turned and raced down the stairs. Near the trains at 30th there is an information desk that I had never taken advantage of before. The man sitting there had a beard and there was no one else around. I LEFT MY LUGGAGE ON THE TRAIN TO DOYLESTOWN! I shouted this at him. He spun around in his chair, swift as a ninja, and snatched a brown phone off the wall. He mashed several buttons and handed the phone over. Tell them what happened he said and immediately turned back to his computer. A woman on the phone said hello. I left my suitcase on the train that just left 30th street and it was the R5 from Paoli but now it’s going to Doylestown and the bag is black and it’s in the rack on the first car. I was leaking confidence that I had made myself understood. The man looked at me again and shouted train 655. Train 655! I said. First train! The woman on the other line immediately hung up. I stared at the man in front of me and handed him the phone. She hung up I said. He put the phone to his ear and said hello, listened for a second, and then hung up. Did she hear you he asked? I think so, I don’t know. Let me try the next station, he said, they will definitely catch it there. The next station after the next was Jefferson, a good 15 minutes away. My Amtrak was leaving in 20. This now meant that my bags weren’t going to Doylestown, which would have been catastrophic, but I was probably going to miss my train and end up having to rent a car and drive 4 hours to Connecticut. A woman approached the counter while the man was on the phone with the other station. Without pause, she asked him for directions to Market street, and she did this, mind you, while it was fully visible that this man was on the phone, which enraged me, especially because this phone call carried life and death ramifications for me. Again I was forced to act quickly. I stepped in between this woman and my man, blocking him from view. I told her to head all the way down the ramp behind her, turn left, and go out of the station. She left at once. This was technically correct, but it also would have been correct if I told her to turn right, because 30th Street Station sits ON Market Street, which continues on either side. I didn’t ask for specifics, I just wanted her out of my sight. The man hung up the phone. He told me he spoke with Jefferson and they would get the bag there. All we could do now was wait. A moment later the phone rang. Suburban! Black suitcase with a green Samsonite tag. Yes! I hung up the phone. The man shouted at me, Take the train to Temple! It leaves in two minutes, track 3! I sprinted up the stairs. On the train I stood next to the door. In 15 minutes my Amtrak would leave the station I was now leaving. There was hope, but even the slightest error would ruin it. It needed to be perfect. I was the first one off. I knew where the lost and found area was because I left my keys on a train the summer before, so I tore-ass across the platform and bounded up the stairs, across the station, and through another set of doors into the customer service room. No one looked at me as I entered. I interpreted this as a bad sign. I tried to look frantic and hurried. Eventually I spoke up. I’m the one who lost the bad I said to no one. The woman at the desk looked all around her and then at me. He eyes were blank with indifference. Just as I braced myself for the bad news another woman appeared from around the corner with my bag in her hands and a little slip to sign! I already had my ID out so I showed it to her and scribbled my initials on the slip. I looked at the woman at the desk who must have read my face and she said plainly to take any train on track three of four, and I banged out of there and back down the steps to the platform and hopped on the train just as the doors were about to close! The whole trip took me less than 10 minutes, which left me enough time to buy that coffee I wanted before getting on my train, where I grabbed a strong beer from the dining car and kept all of my luggage directly in my line of sight.

#writing #travel

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