Off the Rails

Now it’s my turn to stand on the geezer line.

So, there I was Union Station in Washington D.C. waiting to board the train to New York.

I had shown up ridiculously early, as usual, and I was starting to get sick of the place. Finally, people started lining up outside one of the gates.

Not wanting to board the wrong choo-choo and end up in Chattanooga—or Tierra del Fuego—I asked an Amtrak employee if this was indeed the train to the Big Apple.

“Yes,” she said. “Are you over 65 years old?”

I didn’t see the connection and I really didn’t appreciate the question. I have grown quite comfortable (delusional?) with people telling me (lying?) that I look much younger than I am.

A guy told me this at the gym just the other day, damn it. Yet this woman had me pegged as an old timer in under five seconds and my ego was now a train wreck.

“Uh, yes,” I muttered.

“Well, then you can get on the express line.”

She pointed beyond the curving cobra of humanity that was ready to bum rush the train the second the gates opened to a much shorter, straighter, and decidedly older line of people waiting just to the right of the rabble.

I’m familiar with pre-boarding at airports, but that’s meant for veterans, families with small children and people in wheelchairs.

That process never had anything to do with me and I never complained as I knew I’d get on board sooner or later. And that’s how I felt about the train.

Nobody said anything about an express line when I left New York, but now, I’m suddenly getting first dibs. Did I age overnight?

I know this lady meant well and I really appreciate her thoughtfulness. It was her eyesight that was pissing me off.

Tickets, Please…

Maybe she’d spotted my hearing aids and drew the obvious conclusion. I knew I should’ve gotten the kind that disappear in your ears.

I shambled over to the express line, took my place beyond a mature couple who were happily chattering away and checked my phone for the time.

My phone was behaving itself, thankfully, following an incident during my trip that had me convinced the thing was possessed.

I was on a group tour of George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon when the font of my phone suddenly expanded to gargantuan size.

The numbers were so big that I couldn’t use the damn thing—no phone, no camera, no nothing.

I didn’t know it had started and I couldn’t do anything to undo whatever the hell I had done. I couldn’t even turn phone off and restart because the keypad was too big for me to type my password.

I was angry and ashamed. Cellphone cluelessness is one of the telltale signs of the elderly—along with going to the bathroom a lot and starting every sentence with “back in my day…”

I knew it was something simple and that when I figured it out, I would feel really dumb. And I was right on both counts.

I finally decided to let the power run out and pray the big numbers would vanish with a reboot. And just to be on the safe side, I also asked the hotel staff where the nearest Apple store was in case my big idea when kablooey.

The next morning I powered up my phone and as soon as the thing had enough juice I googled my predicament out to the internet. It turns out that the zoom setting was on—with a vengeance---and I quickly disabled it.

I don’t know how I had zoomed in the zoom, but I took some comfort in seeing how many people had run into the same problem.

So, I had two senior moments inside of three days. I’m not comfortable with that at all, but when it was time to board the train, at least I had the pleasure of waltzing by those young chumps fiddling with their phones.

All board—right after me.