The best part of waking up
Thursday, September 28th, 2006I don’t want to limit myself here, but I am 99% sure that I had the best cup of coffee that I will ever have this morning. More on that in a minute, but first:
I love coffee. I drink it everyday. I can’t remember the last time that I’ve ever gone a day without it.
The Brown Line was especially slow this morning. I got on at the Belmont station (I transfer from the Red Line) where we stood still for ten minutes (in this time period the train became completely packed), we then proceeded through the next two stations and then had another ten minute standstill at the Fullerton station. We slowly made our way to Armitage and then, about midway between the Armitage and Sedgewick stations, we came to a complete stop. At this point it was 8:30 in the morning, when I should be at work. The train car was completely crowded (shoulder to shoulder) as we stood still waiting to move to the next stop. The engineer announced that there was a problem with the track and that we would be standing momentarily. Thirty minutes later he announced that the track was too damaged to proceed and that we would have to reverse directions.
At this point we were the lead train in a huge backlog of trains, so I knew that it would take forever before we would start moving. I began to wonder, as I stood in my little tiny square of personal space, how the air circulation was on a jam packed train like this (as I noticed it was slightly hard to breathe). As I was pondering this people from the other end started yelling to push the emergency button and to call 911 because two people had just passed out. The engineer came back and opened the windows in our car and made sure that the two people were okay (they were both alert at that point). Everybody was really nice to each other, and we were all very patient. At one point somebody said what I had been thinking since we came to this dead stop “all I really want is a cup of coffee”. I was tired, I was out of it, my legs hurt from standing for so long, everything (the screaming, panic and then return to ”normal” — as normal as it could be, I guess) just seemed so surreal to me. All I wanted was my morning cup of coffee.
Around 9:45am we actually began to move back toward the Armitage station. We moved back slowly because there was another medical emergency on the train that was two ahead of us. It took an additional thirty minutes to get to the station. I got off of the train and like a bright beacon I saw the Starbuck’s store just accross the street. Sure the fresh air and open space was a welcome change, but I had my mind set on something else. I waited in an extremely long line (apparently I wasn’t the only one on these trains that had this idea), but that was ok with me. I waited this long, I could wait some more. I finally got that cup of coffee.
I’m not very good at vividly describing a moment like this, but I guess I could sum it up by saying: You could give the best commercial actor 1,000 takes and they wouldn’t even come close to the extreme look of pleasure and satisfaction that I am sure that I had at that moment. I got on the bus (no drink rule be damned) and made it to work at 10:45, about two and a half hours later than usual.
The best part of being stuck on a train for over two hours…
