Apple Foot

MBCR: All The Wonderful You've Come To Expect

On Tuesdays, I get on the Stoughton line. I catch the train at 5:20PM at Back Bay, and by 5:32 I'm supposed to be stepping off at Hyde Park.

Tonight I got on the train and, by the time we hit Ruggles, the conductor had announced that due to an emergency ahead of us, we would be traveling slowly. Somewhere just shy of Hyde Park, the conductor announced that due to a medical emergency at Canton Junction, ours was the last train outbound for Stoughton that night, and that our train would either disembark all passengers at Hyde Park for transfer to shuttle buses, or return to South Station to meet up with buses. After twenty minutes or so in a tunnel near Hyde Park (so I couldn't call the person meeting me there to let her know what was going on), the conductor announced that the train would be going back to South Station (no stops at Ruggles or Back Bay) as soon as the driver got back to the car at the other end of the train. Several minutes later, the conductor announced we'd be returning to South Station after a brake test. Several minutes after that, we were moving, and the conductor announced that we would, after all, be stopping at Ruggles and Back Bay (much rejoicing as those of us looking for Orange Line connections thought we'd avoided the South Station vortex). As we got closer to Ruggles, the conductor announced that dispatch had changed their minds again, and that we'd be going straight to South Station.

At about this time, folks started to get cell phone service, and we heard that there was an accident in Canton involving an earlier train and a boxcar.

We pulled into South Station at about 6:26. At this point I'd been on the train for over an hour in order to go back one stop from where I started. As we got out, I recognized the conductor with the train on the other side of our platform: he usually is the conductor for my return from Hyde Park on train 922.

As the crowd was making it's disgruntled way down the platform back toward the station we heard the announcement: "6:30 train to Stoughton now boarding on Track 5."  Chaos ensues, since we just got off the train to Stoughton, and we'd been told there were no more Stoughton trains tonight, and we'd been further told that shuttle buses would be run from South Station. After much shouting, rumormongering, and gesturing reminiscent of traders on the stock exchange floor, it turned out that the 6:30 was only going to 128, then shuttle buses would go to Sharon/Stoughton. This information was not shared over the public address system.

Honest to God--we'd just been on a train that had made it halfway to 128 before being sent back to GO and then were told to get on another train back to 128. Not to mention that now the 6:30 has a double load of people on it, having picked up everybody from train 919.

I realize that when things go wrong, you have to expect a certain amount of inconvenience. There was an emergency, and our train had to be re-routed/re-scheduled. However, the indecision about where exactly we were going and how we were getting home from there, is really disturbing. And stupid.

The MBCR: all the wacky wonderfulness you expect from the MBTA!

P.S. Since my music lesson was well and thoroughly missed, I actually got the Red Line to the Orange Line and went home, wishing the rest of the Stoughton passengers good luck.

Spring Cleaning

The documentary film Possessed spends a few minutes with each of four hoarders. Each hoards different things, for different reasons, and some desire freedom from their stuff more than others.

To me it seems there's a logical progression through the four. The first is the one I think of as most reasonable, probably because he hoards books, which I highly value, too. He's got 6000 books in a one bedroom flat, and he's carefully cataloged them all in a database, including their physical location in the apartment. A fire inspector would probably have a coronary just walking in the door. I could be this guy--I have 6000 comic books, and probably a thousand books.

Contestant number two has a problem with acquisition. Inside of a year, he buys 300 cell phones and stores them, unused, in his stuffed home. He is deeply in debt, and can't seem to stop buying things. He also can't seem to get rid of them once he has them.

The third hoarder is a woman who literally saves junk, albeit somewhat neatly. There are neat stacks of used cosmetic sponges, her kitchen is full of neatly rinsed jars and plastic bottles. She sleeps on half her bed, the other half being stacked with stuff she can't bear to throw out. It looks to me like the reductio ad absurdum of "It's a perfectly good..."  This is the sort of thing I've heard many people, including one of my roommates, say to justify storing some item they have no need of: "It's a perfectly good [item]." It's unthinkable to throw out a perfectly good item, even if you'll never use it, because it's not trash. "That's a perfectly good mayonnaise jar. Someday I could use it to store something in."

Hoarder number four is the sort you think of when you think hoarder (unless you think of cats--thankfully, none of these people hoards live things). He's a rather sad, lonely, late middle-aged man, living in absolute squalor (his once-white stove is black with cooking grease, everything has a thick layer of dust over it) among his piles and piles of trash. As he sits fiddling with a broken pair of eyeglasses and talking about his grief for his deceased mother, all I can feel is profound pity.

I come from a line of hoarders. Great-grandma had stacks of newspapers in her home, and paths from one room to the next between boxes and piles. She had gobs of useless items bought at garage sales and other items she and her pack rat husband deemed "perfectly good..." When their grandchildren cleaned out their home to sell it, construction-grade flatbed trucks were needed to haul away the junk. My grandmother, having grown up in this home, was not much better. When my grandfather made a bedroom out of a partially finished attic, he shoved some of my grandmother's stuff against the side walls and dry walled over it.

I can talk myself out of a certain amount of "It's a perfectly good..."  I can periodically look in my closet and think, "Yes, those are all perfectly good mittens, and I'm never going to wear some of those again," and then throw the extras out or give them away. I can admit that it's time to liquidate the relics of some abandoned hobby. But there are some things I can't seem to get rid of, the worst being the comic books. I throw away magazines all the time, but it's nearly unthinkable to do the same with comic books (I have recently made one or two exceptions). The storage of my comic books is a constant concern, a weight on my life. The thought of moving is horrifying to me, and I fantasize about just walking away from everything I own and letting someone else deal with the disposal.

My roommates contribute more than their fair share to the clutter in our apartment. I try not to be a hypocrite about their clutter. I often remind myself that my collection of comic books is not intrinsically more valuable than the things my roommates hoard. We just value different things, I tell myself, as I jam my coat into the overstuffed closet or gaze despairingly at the "perfectly good" mattress in our tiny front room, or knock over some of the several dozen bottles of shampoo in the bathroom. I remind myself of George Carlin's joke about "my stuff, your crap." Unfortunately, the convergence of my crap with my roommates' crap into a cumulative clutter of crap has become dispiriting.

Possessed is unsettling, bordering on terrifying. That could easily be me. Maybe it already is me, and I just haven't admitted it yet.

St. Paddy's Day Melody

I'm pretty sure you can catch this show live at a tavern in Southie somewhere.

Birthday Cake

Memo to my sisters' kids: when we were little, we didn't have friends over for birthday parties. Birthdays were just family, and we'd get to have some favorite food for dinner, and then Grandma & Grandpa C. would show up with ice cream, and we'd eat cake and ice cream and the grown-ups would drink coffee made in a Corning blue corn flower percolator.

This year and last, my parents have come up from New Jersey to celebrate my birthday, and mom brings cake. Specifically, she brings chocolate mayonnaise cake with a fairly small amount of what I guess is called butter cream frosting.

Funny story about frosting: One day in college my friend E. said something about making fake frosting for a cake. "When you don't have time to make real frosting, you can do this fake thing with butter and confectioner's sugar and vanilla..." I had to inform E. that to most Americans, this is real frosting; fake frosting comes out of a can. E. believes real frosting involves a candy thermometer.

At any rate, every year on my birthday I get myself something sweet to stick a candle in. In recent years, it's been brownies or congo bars or something. I'm usually unsatisfied by my improvised birthday cake (especially if it's actual bakery-bought cake), and I'd thought this was because I was sitting alone in my bedroom singing happy birthday to myself and blowing out a candle from a package I've had in my desk for twenty years. It's not just that, though. Now that I've had mom here with her mayonnaise cake two years in a row, I know what is really lacking on my birthday.

I can't even tell you how happy it makes me to eat birthday cake that tastes like the birthday cake I had as a kid. It would be the perfect birthday if dinner were a couple slices of plain Sicilian from Carmine's, followed by cake and coffee.