Hyphenate

I’m on an Amtrak train snaking its way north from New Haven, Connecticut to my old Boston stomping grounds, alongside a mix of business suits and casual travellers.
I’ve ridden this route often, the view familiar out the dusty glass: silver carriages reflecting on broken windows of destitute brick factories – charming and depressing in decaying grandeur – that mark the coastline, linked by train tracks.
I’m drawn to the banter of a couple of 60-somethings behind me, friends I think, who boarded further south. New York, I hazard a guess. I can’t help but become a silent participant.
Man: “How duz that make him nawt Kosher?”
Woman: “Becawz his mutha wasn’t Jewish at the time.”
Forgive my phonetic spelling: the moment at once engrossing for its topic, its sound, its locale. Trapped in a tin tube, we rhythmically ricochet against the rails, right-rightleft-right-rightleft. Their voices follow suit.
The conductor interrupts our collective attention – their conversation, my auditory anonymity – at precisely 11:06am. So says my laptop, upon which I’ve slightly sheepishly been transcribing their words.
Conductor: “The cafe car is serving breakfast sandwiches, cawfee… maybe a Bloody Mary sounds good right now. Oh and there’s one banana left.”
The couple – Kosher certification resolved, for the time being – share a raucous giggle then turn their focus to apartment foibles and winter’s lingering tendrils. The woman is recounting a mini-drama.
Woman: “Debbie said to me ‘it’s winter time, I’m gonna tawn the hawt wardah service on’.
“I said ‘Debbie, do NOT tawn the wardah on’.
“Debbie said ‘it’s cold, I need to tawn it on’.
“I said ‘Debbie, do you remember what hair-pinned last time you tawned the wardah on? We blew the pipe’.
“She said ‘yeah but that was last time, it won’t hair-pin this time’.
“And sure enough, what hair-pinned? We burst the pipe. Debbie shoulda listened. It wasn’t even that cold.”
It’s as if Woody Allen has begun reading aloud one of his wild scripts; my own meandering imagination couldn’t craft better banter.
Train travel reveals landscape not seen from a plane or car window, attention otherwise split between entertainment, road safety and maps to diffuse the slow creep of time. It’s also a chance to listen, absorb, study.
And so, as the factories race past, I take delight in voyeuristically eavesdropping on two people who’ll never know how they enriched an otherwise familiar trip up the tracks.
I’m grateful I didn’t board the ‘quiet carriage’.