Last night I got on a very crowded subway car. It was peak of rush hour and I was in a rush to get home to grab the car to head over to Watertown to pick up my latest craigslist find (forgot to take a picture and it’s no longer posted). It’s a great mid-century hassock that is the perfect size for my “new to me” arm chair (not really as I grew up with it and it’s been at my dad’s). And a steal at $25. It’s seen better days but an easy enough reupholstering job will fix that – good bones. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I get on the subway car and maneuver my way through the crowds to find the last remaining seat. It was next to a blind woman with her seeing eye dog. I sit down and soon after she asks me which door she should use if she wants to go to Lechmere. Now I use the metro daily but I have my route and am pretty bad about the details of the other parts. I carry on a conversation with her trying to figure it out and hoping someone else on the train will pipe in. We get to the next stop and I offer to hop out and read the signs to see if I can find the answer. No luck, so I offer to walk with her and help find it. She’s very appreciative and I know I’m getting more out of it than she is, after hearing about the recent study that shows good deeds make you healthier (here’s an article). I always put it down to adding to my good karma, but turns out there’s more to it!
Well, I’m just about to head off when this other young lady getting off after us says she’s heading to Lechmere and can take the blind woman. The young lady is Hispanic and very quiet with a heavy accent. It was very sweet of her and much appreciated as it would have put me way behind schedule. So there’s the first good deed on the subway from a stranger. All this went down in a matter of a few minutes and I’m able to hop back onto the same subway. I assumed I had long lost my seat as the car had gotten even more crowded. But nope, the gentleman on my other side had put his Wall Street Journal down and save me my seat. So when I pop back on and look around, he sees me and picks up his paper. How sweet was that? And little did he know how much a die-hard sitter I am! So warm fuzzies all around.
On a somewhat different note, I’m still amazed how many blind people I see on my commutes. I think I’ve seen more blind people in a month here than I have in the rest of my life combined. I just googled to see if I could find a reason but not for my town. The Boston area has been a center due to the creation of the celebrated Perkins School for the Blind a few centuries back. I did however accidentally find this local restaurant review, on which note I close this post:
"And that was my first bite at XXX. After reading all the positive reviews on Yelp, we decided to hike it out to XXX to try a new restaurant. This was of course a mistake in itself because (my town) is like the Jan Brady of Boston -- insecure (I saw 4 cop cars in two blocks!) and about as fun as a blind man trying to watch a porno."
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