Let me first say, however, that I don’t very much like trains. My dislike began on an overnight Eurail trip in college, when I was separated from my friends and had to spend a night bunked with three surly 30-somethings, two of whom were men and none of whom spoke English. (Keep in mind this was not only my first time in Europe, it was also my first train ride ever.) They didn’t announce the stations and I was petrified I would miss my stop in Paris and end up in Belgium or Finland.
I figured things had to be better on a train from Virginia to Massachusetts, even though I knew that eleven hours was going to be no picnic. Yet once again, on the ride north they did not announce the stops, and for whatever reason, train stations on the East Coast have little or no (most often no) signage. I only knew when to get off the train because I kept asking other people who looked like they knew what they were doing. No conductors to be seen, of course. By way of being fair to Amtrak, the way back was much better, both because that engineer deigned to announce stops as we pulled up and because I located the Quiet Car: no noisy undergrads drunk at 10 a.m., and no kicking, biting banshees whose poor beleaguered mothers thought were human children.
We spent Sunday at “The King’s Renaissance Faire” (the extra “e” is obligatory, so that you know it’s authentic), which wasn’t quite as good as the one in Maryland but did have the distinct advantage of having a tiger show. (Not a whip-cracking, big cats jumping through flaming hoops sort of show, but a “look at the pretty tiger: reduce, reuse, recycle, and don’t buy furniture made from illegally harvested timber in Southeast Asia” sort of show. How it ended up at a Ren Fest is beyond me, but the spokesman was wearing satyr horns, so that clearly signalled his belonging.) By the way, the joust was completely fixed (a bit of a disappointment after being to jousts where the winner was not determined beforehand to suit a hero/villain storyline), but it ended with a staged beheading, complete with spurting arteries, which was quite exciting.
We also spent Columbus Day at the Arboretum near Jamaica Plain: it has a wonderful view of downtown Boston from the top of one of its hills, and all its plants are labeled: I now know what ash and plane trees look like. That pleases the linguist in me, not the botanist; I don’t care where the ash trees grow or what their life cycle is, but I, like our ancestor the first Gardener, am still in the business of knowing things' names. And besides all the dozens of dogs being walked on the trails (most of whom my sister stopped to pet), the Arboretum offers some lovely shady spots under oak trees just perfect for sitting and reading aloud. We started on The Pickwick Papers and, despite the fact that Dickens can run a sentence to the full length of a paragraph, he makes for excellent recitation. Just try A Christmas Carol this December and you’ll see. It was a perfect way for two bibliophiles to spend an afternoon.
I wish I could have stayed in Boston longer, but duty called, and they haven’t yet invented voicemail for that sort of thing. If they ever do, I’ll be first in line to let duty leave a message: I’ll be in the park reading Dickens with my sister!
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