Mussolini vs The Good Samaritan

Wed 13 Oct 2010 Filed in: My Life | Reflections
For twenty-four hours I felt that I was living in the myth of Mussolini’s Italy. The lie he wanted his world to believe was that he had made the trains run on time. The southbound Coast Starlight I was riding is not an Italian train, and it doesn’t have the world’s greatest on-time record. But this Amtrak adventure was different; we arrived at each station when scheduled or significantly earlier, much to the delight of the smokers on board who could then enjoy a platform nicotine break. I warned my brother who was meeting me yesterday that the train I was riding just might be early, but it turned out that the only thing early was my warning.

Yesterday’s northbound Coast Starlight was having problems that even Mussolini couldn’t fix. With a malfunctioning locomotive, it was 100 miles into its journey and six hours behind schedule. So it was that somewhere north of Santa Barbara, we stopped to dissolve both the dream of an early arrival and the nightmare of a stalled train. Those in the know disconnected one of our two locomotives, turned it around on a convenient Y, and hooked it up to the front of the stalled northbound train. A sacrificed hour later, both trains were on their way.

It would be a happy ending were it not for the muttered grumbles of a few passengers fretting over the possibility that they might miss a connecting train in Los Angeles. It seems to me that in the eternal scheme of things, an hour spent parked by the Pacific to help those more inconvenienced than me is not a bad thing. But there is this streak of selfishness that slithers through the soul, trying to convince us of our own importance. The next time I’m tempted to pass by a neighbor in need, someone needs to remind me of yesterday’s Coast Starlight and that not even Mussolini made the trains run on time.
Happy
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