Barb's Burblings

When I'm waiting for the

When I'm waiting for the train in the morning, I'm often reminded of when I studied abroad. I remember taking the train from Colchester to London. When the train was getting close in to the city, it passed by Tube stations in the suburbs, and I remember looking out at the people on those platforms, wondering about their lives. And as I stand in the cold, on the train platform at Twinbrook, I realize that I am one of those people. There's a part of me that thinks that just because someone lives in a different country, his or her life is somehow inherently different from my own. But that's not really true. (Well, that's not true in the case of England; if we were talking someplace like Moldova or Iraq, well, obviously our lives are going to be very different.) They commute, they work, they hang out with their friends. They live in apartments and houses. Their lives are really no more different from mine than are the lives of some of the people I work with, people who live right here in DC.

I know that none of this is profound. But for some reason it always strikes me. But whenever the MARC train passes by, I kind of hope that there's someone on there who's not a commuter. I want there to be a backpacker on there, wondering about the lives of the people standing on the platform, waiting for the Metro.