MBTA Commuter Rail to Providence
I thought the train left at 7:00 a.m., so I set my alarm for 5:00 and, somehow, was still asleep at 5:48 when the cats woke me up instead. Twenty minutes and one panicked shower later, and I was out the door.
I made it with plenty of time to spare. But standing there, scanning the board to figure out what track the train was on, another wave of panic flooded over me. Where the fuck is my train?? I thought, looking over the departures again and again.
I don’t know how I misread the schedule—I’d checked it so many times—but there it was. 7:30 — PROVIDENCE. There was nowhere to sit in South Station, so I leaned against the wall of a closed restaurant kiosk and watched the other commuters pass through. Forty-five minutes later—thirty-some-odd minutes more than I thought I had—my train left. In the half-empty car, I looked around at the other people for whom it was too early for anything—bags placed strategically on the seats to keep other passengers, later, from sitting down beside them—and did the same. The train crept slowly along the tracks. Someone out of sight was talking on the phone and said, I blame everything on daylight savings.