The T hosts all walks of life at all hours of the day- well, at least until 12:30. In the morning, the business men and women scurry to work. They poke their heads out of the office again for lunchtime and 5 o’clock. Those are probably the peak hours for the subway. For my visit at 10 o’clock on a Thursday morning, I wasn’t really expecting many passengers. At the Boylston stop on the Green Line, an elderly tourist couple helped each other up the stairs, while people in top hats and clown noses paused outside the station with pamphlets in hand. If that was an indication of the types of people I would observe that day, I didn’t know what to make of it.
When I headed down, two college-age guys were already waiting on the platform for Boylston Outbound. Maybe they were heading home after a morning class. Maybe they were heading to a morning class. Maybe they weren’t in college at all. They each had their headphones in, and were lost in their own worlds. However, they were conscious enough of this world to realize they shouldn’t get on the E Line, like I did. I had boarded the train without a second thought. The E Line didn’t have many stops appealing to the everyday public, so unless I wanted to get off the first official E stop at the Prudential or ride all the way to the Museum of Fine Arts, I might have attracted stares from residents returning home. Maybe I should have put my ended up leaving at Copley, along with hundreds of elementary school kids (and their chaperones) from the car in front of me. They all wore nametags and held hands, and I figured that their teachers must have orchestrated a fieldtrip to the Boston Public Library. They presented a cuter kind of chaos than the T was probably used to. Those kids must have been excited to leave school, for matter the reason. I didn’t see where they were headed, because following them would have been severely creepy, and I then had the right mind to catch the C Line.
The C Line wasn’t as crowded as the E Line, so I got a seat. Across the aisle from me was a mother in a black sweatsuit holding a water bottle and a baby. The baby was also holding a bottle, but he seemed more transfixed with my jeans than his milk. The mother seemed tired and bored, and was staring into space. I was curious where she was going. She was heading away from downtown, and towards the residential areas on the C Line. Was she returning home after picking up her son at morning day care? Was she visiting her mother? Wherever she was headed, the baby seemed more excited to be on the train than she was.
Further down the T, there was a man reading a Chinese newspaper, and a short man in a scaly cap. The short man had on quite a puffy jacket for a mild day in October. When I accidentally made eye contact with him, he immediately looked away. Did he know he was the subject of study? Was he embarrassed because he had my momentary attention? Both men departed at the Hynes stop, like myself, and quickly became lost in the crowd. I don’t think either of them were professors at Berkley, and they didn’t join me on Newbury St. Their stories continued without me, and I haven’t the foggiest clue of what they would have entailed.
Later, around 11 o’clock, I boarded the Green Line Inbound at the Hynes. So did a girl with black leggings and a jacket that looked like the fabric love child between Van Gogh and Picasso’s works, and was just long enough to be appropriate. She wore an equally colorful scarf. A boy about her age (grad school?) let her go on first- whether for chivalry, or an appreciative view from the back, I wasn’t sure. She sat in the first single seat, and he opted to stand. I sat in an otherwise empty double across from them. The train was relatively sparse, so I wondered why the tan sweatshirt, baggy jeans, and dirty sneakers-clad boy was standing. Perhaps his stop was soon, but we went by Copley and Arlington without him leaving. I think he wanted to appear more manly, and impress the girl by his ability to stand on the T. They both got off at Boylston with me, and I concluded that the girl was an Emerson student. The boy continued on to an office that had “Adult Internal Medicine” labeled in several different languages on the windows. Maybe he went there to cure his heartbreak from not talking to the girl, or maybe he just had a stomachache.
That was the end of my observations for the day. You can gather a small picture of a person from their clothes and destinations. I felt as if I were separated from the other passengers- I was an observer, and they were the observed. But they could have observed me just as easily. I wonder what people would have assumed when they looked at me: a girl of average height, with hair pulled into a ponytail, jacket, jeans, sneakers, and a purse that kept falling off my shoulder. Avoiding your gaze, but noticing you all the same. In the end, I was no different from them. I was just another passenger on the T trying to get from one place to another.
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