Michael F. DuBois

The trains in Boston get crowded around 5pm every weekday. Yesterday on my way home, I found myself jammed between what seemed to be thousands of angry people in one small train. I’ve always wondered what makes people so angry about being around others, why everybody in crowds always seem to be unhappy. I’m ridiculous, and in my head I always picture that there is one man that starts it all. He enters the train station really angry for no reason at all, and slowly but surely infects every single person he comes in contact with, causing a chain reaction that slowly spreads the anger to every living being in the entire train station. Maybe some day Ill find this man and let kittens and puppies loose on him so he can never again be angry. Ever.

ANYWAY. I was on the train, hundreds of people, everybody angry. I was standing, bumping into every single person around me, and probably making them even more angry because of it. I knew that at some point the angryness would find its way to me and I too would find myself in a bad mood. What I was not aware of, however, is that the day had different plans for me.

There was a lady sitting in a seat next to where I was standing. She was reading a book and once in a while would turn to her notebook and write down something she had just highlighted. She was in her own little world. Then, as happens at every new T stop, the doors opened and even more people flooded in, packing everybody that much closer together. Squeezing through all of the people came a little boy and his father looking for a seat. Among the hundreds of people that filled the train, most of them standing, there had been a seat that by some amazing odds has just opened up right next to the lady. The little boy spotted the seat and jumped right up onto it, leaving the father standing next to him.

Now for atleast a half hour I had heard nothing but angry breathing, screetching wheels and a computer voice telling me the name of the T stop everytime we stopped at a station. And then, out of now where, a human voice came from this little boy.

“What’s that?”

The lady looked up. Everybody around us looked up. With the few words that he knew, to a perfect stranger that could have been just as mad as anybody else on the train, he decided to ask her what she was holding in her hand.

“This is a book. Its my homework.”

And then, after two seconds of looking at his bright happy face, she smiled.

“That’s a one!” he said as he pointed to an L in the title of the book.

“No, that’s an L” she said, quickly looking through the book “But look, that’s a one! And look there! There’s a five!”

“FIVE!” he yelled back.

Slowly, more and more people around us began to listen in, and in time, people began to smile and even laugh at how cute the situation was. On a Boston train somewhere far underground, a group of perfect strangers shared a moment. We were all laughing and smiling, all in on the joke, sometimes even looking at eachother for a second to share with our eyes how absolutely adorable we thought it was. At that moment we were all friends, we all understood eachother. There was no hate, no miscommunication, no problems. All because of one little boy who decided to speak and one lady who decided to listen, people actually changed their emotion from anger to happiness, from closed to open, and from hate to love.

I will probably never see that lady again, she will probably never happen to run into that little boy and his father, but just knowing that for a moment in time they were able to make the people around them happy proves to me one of the most important things anyone can ever know in life…

Although anger travels from one person to the next, happiness can travel at twice the speed as long as we allow ourselves open up and feel it.