The Train Stops Here

More snow is forecast for tonight and tomorrow. But that's not what I want to talk about. It's the morning light, the morning that comes earlier every day, pink tinged and proud. It's the rosy fingered dawn that Homer wrote about in "The Odyssey," still rosy, still here. And it's a guy I noticed this morning while waiting for the train, just an ordinary guy in a black pea coat, who thrust his right index finger up into the air and then very definitively pointed it down again as the old Orange Line cars lumbered into Vienna station. He looked as if he were delivering a downbeat to the New York Philharmonic or refereeing the Super Bowl, but what he was really doing was pointing to his place on the platform, saying to the great god Metro, "I want the door to open here. Right here where I'm standing." And, by golly, it did; a door opened magically in front of him. This is the wish of weary commuters everywhere, that the doors will open right in front of us, that we'll step into empty trains and find seats. The pantomimer was just more open about this desire than the rest of us. We can all use a little levity in the morning.