Life advice on the Metro North

Riding the rails in the godless Northeast

This week, for the first time since Before Times, we traveled to see a Broadway play (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) and cheered along with everyone else when the announcer said at the beginning, “Welcome back to Broadway.” Masked, shot, and boostered, I felt heroic.

The play was Aaron Sorkin at his preachiest, but worth it.

On the way home, the train wasn’t crowded — I saw few crowds in New York, though there were lines at a multitude of COVID testing sites on the streets. At the Harlem station at 125th, a young woman in frayed black jeans came into the car and apologized quietly — without missing a beat in the conversation she was having through her earbuds — as we shuffled to make room and she sat on the seat across from us.

She and I were knee-to-knee on the train, and as she kept her eye on her iPad and played solitaire, I heard her give such good advice on her phone that I began taking notes. Here’s what I wrote:

• “But does that make you happy? Are you doing what you’re doing to be happy, or to be liked?” Damn.

• “Can you name one thing you said last week that would look good carved in stone?” Uh…no? And I said a lot.

• “Are you a shark or a pineapple?” I may have misheard that one.

• “Is your answer yes? It should be yes more often than no.” Here is where I part paths with my Metro North seer. She obviously hangs out with a higher class of people than do I. Among my colleagues, the answer should mostly be no.

• “You can’t expect the world to bow to your whims.” Another flat note. I absolutely do expect that. Every. Damn. Day.

After a while, I motioned to my seat mate to make sure he saw her, too. I mean, for all I knew, she was visible only to me, and she’d come a long way to give me much-needed advice. But then she opened a bag of Pepperoni Combos, and I stopped worrying if she was an angel. I don’t know if angels actually eat, but I guess they don’t eat Pepperoni Combos.

As I pretended to read a book on my phone, I figured from her conversation that she was talking to a man who was about to become her ex-boyfriend. He wasn’t trustworthy, and she was a woman who deserved a trustworthy man. She said this several times, and I got a little bored. If you find yourself caught in a leg-hold trap (or a dead-end relationship), chop off the leg. Don’t chew it off.

And then she set her phone on the seat next to her while she shuffled for something in her purse. Because I’m nosy, I glanced at the screen, and saw there was no one on the phone with her. No one.

So all this time, she’d been talking into the phone to herself, and I felt my heart swell for her. I do the same thing in my car. I practice difficult conversations so that when it’s time for the real thing, I’m prepared. She sounded like she was building up her nerve. When I talk to myself in the car, I’m practicing being less blunt than I normally am. Sometimes the practice helps, but only sometimes.

I stopped taking notes and said a little prayer for the woman. The prayer was this: When the time comes to have that difficult conversation with the boyfriend, I pray she’s prepared, and I pray she follows her own excellent advice.