And Sometimes I Wonder About You

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Taking the local train from Philly to New York’s Penn Station may not be as smooth as the Acela’s ride but it gets the job done for a few dollars less and sometimes, like that Monday afternoon, the car is nearly empty and a man has time to think.

My nearest neighbor across the aisle was a slim and dapper gentleman, well past retirement and dressed in an out-of-season white seersucker suit with light blue pin-striping. It was cool that fall and he would have done well with a heavier fabric, but maybe that was just the octogenarian’s style — or maybe his only suit. He was napping, talking in his sleep. The unintelligible words came from his lips like a sporadic spoken-word song in another language. Maybe it was a foreign tongue.

Six rows back, I knew, sat a behemoth of a man wearing black-jean overalls and a heavy, long-sleeved blue-and-white-checkered work shirt. From a thick steel chain around the big man’s neck depended a real horseshoe that had never been attached to any hoof. The man was in his forties, over four hundred pounds, with red hair and the raspberry and cream — colored skin of a Norseman. His regular breathing, when you got within two rows, was loud enough to hear over the clacking of metal wheels on metal tracks.

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