Two Subway Stories

The day before yesterday I was riding the subway home at about 7 in the evening; it was a Sunday and the car was about half-full.  The crowd was mellow after an unusually warm day, and I was coming from an almost 12-hour volunteer stint during which I ate very little and stood on my feet the entire time.  I was inputting reminders to myself in my cell phone for things I had to do the following day, and out of the corner of my eye I made out a somewhat imposing man in his 60's in dark clothes.  He had a large, bushy gray beard, and was singing to himself; too low for me to hear what he was singing, but loud enough to make me think he at least had a real song in mind.  He would switch every so often to a falsetto -- a real, practiced falsetto -- and then back to his normal voice; and it made me second guess myself and wonder if he was actually singing gibberish.  He sort of chuckled to himself a little, and mumbled something, then in a raspy voice asked a little too loudly, 'Hey miss!  Do you know what time it is?'  I looked over at him, then back at my cell phone, and answered 'Ten minutes past seven.'  He gave an emphatic nod and answered, without hesitating, 'Xie xie'.  Let me explain that this man was as white as the driven snow, and the ease and perfection with which he pronounced 'Thank You' in Chinese was surprising to me, even these days, and in this city.  I loved that he spoke my mother tongue, that he cared to speak to me in it; and I responded almost as quickly, but with a huge smile, 'Bu ke qi'.  This must have gratified him, because he immediately dug into his bag for a peppermint candy which he subsequently offered me.  I took it, laughing a little, and muttered my thanks; but then had to get up because we'd arrived at my stop.  As I approached the train doors, he saw that I was carrying a large black bag--which people invariably mistake for an instrument--and he said a little too loudly "Very talented too!"  I smiled and said goodbye, and I'm not sure I heard him correctly but I think he said the same thing to me, but in Chinese.  As I left the train I thought about how many times I was told as a kid never to accept candy from strangers.  This time, of course, I kept it.

Yesterday I was coming home from taking my companion (I love this word; the perfect intermediary between significant other, lover, and boyfriend) out to eat for his birthday, and we were waiting at a station to transfer from an express train to a local train.  Various people were staring into the tunnel to see if they could make out the headlights of the subway train in the distance, and all of a sudden an unnaturally bright light appeared there.  Whatever it was, was approaching the station, slowly, and as it came closer the light coming from it became brighter and brighter.  I thought, 'it couldn't possibly be a subway train' but everyone who was waiting with us kept looking at it expectantly, even when the light became too bright to look at comfortably.  Then it ceased to move, not in front of us like a regular train, but at the very beginning of the platform.  And then the strangest thing happened.  People on the platform began to walk toward the light.  I had this feeling that they were all walking toward some alien mother ship, à la Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  But if these were aliens, there was no way I was going to stand there and avoid making contact with them.  So I started to walk toward the light too.  It was so bright I had no choice but to look away, but all of us were still kind of swarming to it, in slow motion.  Nobody was sure this was the train, yet something about the light was drawing us to it.  Once we got very close, it became clear that the train was not a train at all, but a sort of moving office.  It had a few windows, and through them we saw what looked like desks, chairs, and people looking at instruments and holding clipboards.  The bright light turned out to be coming from several very large lamps attached to the front of the vehicle.  When the vehicle started to move again, slowly, we all stopped walking toward it and went back to where we had originally been standing, in the middle of the platform.  I wasn't disappointed that it wasn't the subway train as much as I was sorry to find it wasn't an alien vehicle that had appeared out of nowhere and was planning to take some of us with it.  I will never forget those eerie few moments when we were all beginning to approach it without any real idea of what it was.  Later, after my companion and I had gotten off the subway at the stop near where we live, I saw the office car--probably assigned to test various things along that subway track--again.  Since our stop is an above-ground stop, and we were walking downstairs to street level at the time, we watched it pass overhead with its ultra-bright lights.  It reminded me again of being in a movie.  That is probably the closest I will ever get to an encounter of the third kind.