She was surrounded by luggage.<\/p>\n
I boarded the Light Rail train at Cultural Center, after running hard for half a block in sub-freezing cold, just to be sure that I would not have to wait fifteen minutes for the next Hunt Valley train. As I surmounted the stairs into the railcar I saw a woman on the handicapped seat right at the door, with luggage to both sides, at her feet, and on the seat beside her. All told, eight pieces — large duffles, small duffles, backpacks, tote bags.<\/p>\n
The car was curiously crowded this morning, and I found a seat midway back.<\/p>\n
I glanced at the woman as I settled in. I judged her to be about thirty. She had dirty blond hair, curly, a little more than shoulder length. She wore black; her top, beneath her brown jacket, had some kind of shimmering quality to it. The old writer’s trick of forming a story about the details presented by a stranger came to mind. Why all the luggage? She’s traveling, obviously. But from where to where? I noticed an airport baggage tag on one of the bags. Perhaps she’d been overseas for Christmas and was just returning home. No, I noticed books in one of the open totes. A grad student in history, then, just returned from a semester in Europe.<\/p>\n
The train rolled through North Avenue and Woodberry. She had an awful<\/i> lot of luggage. I could not stop thinking about the luggage.<\/p>\n
Is there an adjective to describe a quantity of luggage? A flock of geese, a murder of crows. But luggage? A malarkey of luggage? I like that. I could not stop thinking of her malarkey of luggage. <\/p>\n
She looked at me. Perhaps I’d been studying her luggage and she was curious why. Or perhaps she just was taking a look around the car. Either way, we made eye contact, and I pointed at her. “Are you going to need a hand offloading?” I asked.<\/p>\n
She smiled. “You must have read my mind.”<\/p>\n
I smiled back. “What’s your stop?”<\/p>\n
“Mount Washington,” she said.<\/p>\n
That was still a little ways up.<\/p>\n
I moved a seat closer, and we talked for a few moments. A grad student she was not. She was from California. She was a missionary en route to Nigeria for a year. She was taking a library with her; one of her duffels was packed<\/i>.<\/p>\n
She asked what I did, and I told her, and thus began a brief conversation about writing.<\/p>\n
We arrived at Mount Washington, and I picked up the duffels, nearly tripping my way out the door, as I wasn’t used to their weight and I was unbalanced in trying to get down the stairs. She brought a couple more bags out, and then I helped her move another heavy duffel. She was then to wait for a friend.<\/p>\n
I wished her well on her missionary work, reboarded the train, and on my way to work I went.<\/p>\n
It was a morning for observing strangers on the train and the subway. I saw a woman on the subway — silver hair, perhaps in her late-fifties — shuffling tarot cards. Tarot cards!<\/p>\n
And then there was snowfall from a clear blue sky; I thought it a strange portent and an ill-omen, though in reality today turned out fine.<\/p>\n
Such was my morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
She was surrounded by luggage. I boarded the Light Rail train at Cultural Center, after running hard for half a block in sub-freezing cold, just to be sure that I would not have to wait fifteen minutes for the next Hunt Valley train. As I surmounted the stairs into the railcar I saw a womanContinue reading “On a Malarkey of Luggage”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[4093,605,4124],"class_list":["post-2628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-life","tag-light-rail","tag-work","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}