Connecting the Dots

What do you do when The Girl is three states away for a bridesmaid dress-fitting (with the car you both share) and she comes down with food poisoning the flu the same day she’s supposed to drive back to Baltimore?

You get online, purchase a ticket on Amtrak.com for the 3 o’clock train from Penn Station to Newark International Airport. You call your friends to try and arrange a ride to the station but they all seem to be out (it is the Sunday afternoon before Valentine’s Day after all). So you call a cab. First, you try Diamond Cab.

The “first” in the previous sentence suggests that Diamond Cab turns out not to be the best decision. The hour and fifteen minutes between the call to the cab company and the time the train leaves the station (which is only a 5 minute drive from your house) is generous. When a cab hasn’t shown up an hour later, you have the right to be a bit fkustered (that’s definitely not a typo, you’re not merely “flustered” at this point). You call back. They’re still trying to find you a cab. You sincerely doubt that they’re trying too hard. In the hour spent waiting for your Diamond Cab you see no less than five—yes, five—Checker Cabs drive past (who knows how many snuck by when you ran upstairs to check for a message from Diamond Cab) so you tell them not to bother, hang up and call Checker Cab.

After calling The Girl to notify her of the change of plans, you return to the Amtrak site to see about the 4 o’clock because it’s pretty obvious that you’re not going to make the 3. That will put you in Newark for 6:30pm and you still have to make the hour drive to the friend’s apartment plus a 4 hour drive home. But before you can make the change to the reservation a Checker cab is at your door. You hop in and ask in jest if the cabbie thinks he can get you to the station by 3. No problem, he says. According to your iPod, it’s 2:52pm as you slide across the slick, ducktape-patched back seat of the cab. Three minutes later, two run red lights, and some breakneck single lane passing and you’re there with time to drop your credit card while fumbling at the automated reservation center.

You run to the platform, even holding the door for a gentleman with far more bags than just the laptop case you’re carrying. No train! But there are too many other passengers for you to have missed it. You look both ways up and down the track and decide you have time to run back up into the station to use the payphone to unnotify The Girl of the change in plans. Fortunately, you’re right.

Now, if you can just remember not to get off at Newark, Delaware you might be able to get home in time for a good night’s sleep. Too bad about all that work you had planned to get done today.

(As you pass 30th Street Station in Philly you think, don’t Stan and crew live somewhere around here?)

Let’s see Hallmark slap a UPC label on storming New Jersey on an Amtrak train to retrieve your damsel in distress.