Transfiguration Happens On The Northeast Regional

or, I can feel god in this Chili's tonight

“This is the river side,” she said. She was standing in the aisle to my right, holding on to the plush seat back with a tiny overnight bag balanced just so on sweatered shoulder. I looked up at her as she looked out my window at the bowels of Penn Station, imagining the Hudson there. A man appeared behind her, parking his roller bag to look out the same window and imagine the same thing, wordlessly slipping the duffle from her arm to take it onto his own. “Well we need the river side, don’t we,” he said. 

I had to look away because I could feel tears itching the edges of my eyes. Typically I’d invite any opportunity for a good cry. I don’t get them often (charmed life), so when I’m watching the June Carter Cash documentary and see the chance to sob I will, to purge. But not on a train. Nowhere am I in a more emotionally precarious state, and allowing one tear to fall would unleash a veritable log flume of lachrymosity. 

Unlike an airplane, where weepiness is I think a product of sheer terror (we are not supposed to fly), it’s the tactile romance of train travel that makes me so snivelly. The noises are the same as they’ve always been — the same grinding of metal from the industrial revolution, the same discordant, somber whistle that sounds like a ghost would. Massive windows frame everything like a landscape painting, conferring an air of beauty onto each frozen lake, each rundown trackside neighborhood. Most people on trains are traveling alone, leaving the city for the day to see a friend upstate or to go back home for a long weekend. All of us are vulnerable and thus kinder to each other, jumping out of our seats to help dock heavy suitcases and offering to plug in each other's laptops across our legs. 

When on top of and underneath and in line behind the 8 million that live in New York, it is very easy to become jaded by People. Every face is just one of the thousand I’ll see today, someone in my way or someone who might punch me or someone who wants nothing to do with me at all. I have spooned women on the way to work that I will never see again. Our constant contact makes closeness banal. People are one of the hundred things we have to decide to get used to in order to survive here. Another line item in the long list of stuff I take for granted until my dad comes to visit and can’t believe how much dog poop there is on the sidewalks. I don’t have the heart to tell him that it probably isn’t dog poop. 

On the Amtrak, though, I remember what People can be — sensitive and gracious and so gentle with each other that it makes my eyes water. I remember it on the subway, too, when I watch a boy wordlessly get up from his seat to make room for an old lady who needs it more, not even making eye contact so as not to embarrass her or make her feel indebted. And I remember it on the elevator. Nowhere else do men so viciously insist upon holding the door for me, on letting me enter and exit first, on surrendering their own much stronger, calloused fingers to the panel of buttons to spare mine own, lest they should break when I push “12.” Chivalry may be dead when it comes to too-tall men stepping on my feet to get a better view of Greensky Bluegrass, but it is alive and well on the elevator.

Once a quarter, when I feel compelled to feel like something infinite is taking care of me, I go to Grace Church with my best friend Lucy. We went last Sunday, the last of the Epiphany, per the program. The rector gave the sermon. His name is Don, and he’s funny and kind and he kind of sounds like Mr. Incredible’s boss and he also used to be my ex’s baseball coach. His sermon centered around a short story by Madeleine L’Engle about her dog, Timothy, a red Irish setter who lived with her family in the countryside. Timothy would run off-leash in a meadow nearby, and against the laws of nature made best friends with a swallow who lived there too. 

As he spoke I could feel myself melting into the cushion of the pew, every parishioner melting alongside me, picturing a montage of Timothy and his swallow relishing in each other’s company, defying all harsh expectations of predator and prey. It’s a dynamic that constitutes an entire genre of videos of the ilk my Aunt Laura and I most particularly like to DM back and forth. One from her of a cat who loves snuggling with the family chickens, one from me of a tiger who’s raised a teacup pig as her own. 

“We love these stories so much,” Don said, “because we see in them a fleeting glimpse of what human life was supposed to be like — nature as it would have been were it not for the fall from grace. Humanity as God intended it.” And here I was thinking it had to do with the fact that I love kittens and little pigs.

These are moments of transfiguration, of magic in seeing good will and harmony in a place you wouldn’t expect it. Like on the subway, or in the elevator, or on the Northeast Regional. I remember that all the people in my way are people, and I see the potential for something in stark opposition to malice, and far beyond coexisting. “These are the times when heaven and earth overlap.”W

When we stopped at the station at Hastings on Hudson I watched a grey-haired man in a blue puffer coat wait forever while every passenger passed him by. He started looking anxiously over his shoulders and into the parking lot and I thought “if we pull away before I see him find whomever he’s waiting for it will ruin the next 24 hours for me.” Our train lurched. I felt tears well in my eyes again and then a woman came up behind him from out of the bathroom. He jumped and hugged her tight and hooked his puffy arm through her puffy arm and they shuffled away just as we started to move again. I pressed my head against the glass, knowing exactly how cliche that looked. “You may listen to ‘Stop This Train’ once,” I told myself. As if.

Pony Recommends:

1. I told you: I watched June and I cried so hard it made Isabel a little worried I think. But before I started crying (seriously the last 10 are NOT A JOKE) I was giggling and singing and gasping at her charisma. She saved Johnny Cash’s life and she gave Kris Kristofferson his career and SHE WROTE RING OF FIRE.

2. Odele’s dry shampoo is changing my life. I won’t say how many days it had been since I’d washed my hair in this photo because that is private but I cannot even express to you how much better it looks here than it did when I woke up. I would not want you to have to see that. And now you never will!

3. Sara and I had dinner last week at Hildur, which is a newish Swedish-French fusion restaurant in Dumbo. I really like it in there, and I really love their meatballs.

As well as their salad and their rye bread service.

4. Amy Sedaris’s home tour. Especially the part where she pulls up her covers to show all the places her pet rabbit Tina has chewed through her mattress and says “that’s Tina’s style.”