Animal Stencils

Communting by train is new to me still, and will probably never become boring. There is endless opportunity to observe all sorts of human behaviors, the rare and the mundane.

The other day a man in a tattered purple track suit boarded, pulling a suitcase on wheels with a boombox haphazardly duck taped to it. He (consideratly) asked what we wanted to listen to. When no one responded, he announced, “It doesn’t matter, I’m going to listen to whatever the hell I want” and hit play, subjecting the other passengers and I to 40 minutues or so of smooth jazz elevator music.

Everyone sat in tense silence while he proceeded to make belligerant and racially insensitive comments about the appearance of various passengers, calling a man with dreadlocks “rasta” and a man who was probably Middle Eastern “amigo”. And so on. I pretended to read the newspaper and passed nervous glances back and forth with the woman next to me while waiting for my stop.

~Andrea