This week I have been running later than usual getting out of the house. Either Marlo was sick, or I wanted to keep checking the sprinklers, or wanting to catch up on mail, all before hopping on the Vespa. I usually don’t have any minutes to spare, so adding in activities only pushes me to miss Southport and instead get on at Greens Farms.

The cast of characters at Greens Farms includes Dave, the yoga guru financial analyst, and Trevor and Liz, the couple who hook up on the train and recently had a baby together – the scandal!

Greens Farms is the second station in Westport, and gets a pretty good sized crowd getting on and off the train. So as I have been taking the train from Southport, which is closer to my house and the crowds are much smaller, and I always can get the seat I want because I get on one stop earlier.

I spent the winter at Southport because the parking was available and still open for some of the later trains. Getting the seat I wanted meant that I could get the views of Long Island Sound on the ride in. It also meant that I could relax, write, think of the things I am grateful for, and get perspective on the events in my life, some of which I write about here.

What I don’t get is friendship. Sure, I know in passing some of the folks in Southport, like the guy who gets dropped off and picked up – never late – in the new Explorer. Or the young lady and the guy I work with who sit together in a group and are so happy. Or the short beautiful lady who is dropped off by her maid after speeding through the streets only to get out of the car at the last second, walk into the train dressed superbly with jewels everywhere (except on her ring finger), never wearing the same thing twice, with two big bags and a cup of coffee, making her way to the type A last car and sitting in the same seat every time, and saying the F word more often than someone might say hello. I guess southport has its share of characters.

What I get at Greens Farms are friends whose lives intertwine with mine on and off the train. Immediately upon riding in and parking Dave slaps me on the back and gives me crap about waltzing back to this station after my “self-imposed introspective isolation.” Dave and I often sit together and laugh about the characters we see on the train, like the woman who kept checking me out while Dave thought she was looking at him. Like most folks as they get older, Dave probably needs to get his eyes checked.

It was with Dave when we began to see an odd pattern unfolding in our car. A young lady would get on the car with us and sit in the seat in front of us. Nothing odd about that until later in the ride a young man would come and join her…every day! We wouldn’t think anything about it until they started sitting very closely and he would even fall asleep on her shoulder. Was this a train-mance? Were these two hooking up on the train? Both of them wore wedding rings, so that raised a few eyebrows from Dave and me.

We watched this pattern until one day I leaned forward and slapped them on the shoulder and said, “Okay, what’s going on here!??. Are you guys having an extramarital illicit train-mance?” They both laughed and that’s when we came to know Trevor and Liz. As we thought, they were married and they were “together” on this train! We totally called it, except they were married to each other, and Trevor would be the gentleman and drop Liz off at the platform, and then go park the car himself. Often he would have to run to make the train and got on at some other car, and then walked back to meet her.

This provided lots of laughs and continued the train enjoyment of figuring out the story of many of the train characters. While I was away on my self-imposed exile, Liz had a baby and we have yet to determine who the father is.