We were on the train from the Bronx to Grand Central Station in Manhattan—my son Diego, his friend Owen, and me—when the conductor reached our row to scan the three tickets on my phone.
Owen looked up at him and said, “If I eat at 4:15 or 4:30, that can still be lunch, right? A late lunch, right?”
With his moustache and dark hair, the uniformed fellow, who must have been about forty, looked as if he’d jumped right out of The Polar Express.
“Well, sure,” he replied. “Four-thirty’s still lunch. When you get to five, well, that’s more like dinnertime.”
The wise conductor understood validation was warranted.
This summer, like the past eight or so summers, Owen has come down from Cape Cod to visit us in Connecticut for the weekend.
Now, both Diego and Owen are autistic and love routines, and by now have come to expect—almost demand—a very specific schedule of activities. These include, in our Connecticut town, visiting the coffee shop where Diego used to work, and, in New York City, going to the Bronx Zoo and to Hudson Yards to walk the High Line and buy goodies at Dylan’s Candy Bar.
This year, I decided to pack it all into a single afternoon, and to use the train and Uber for transportation, as I don’t much like driving, especially in summer when traffic is unpredictably heavy.
Well, it was all going splendidly. We stopped by the coffee shop on our way to the municipal lot and got on the train to the Bronx, where we took an Uber to the zoo, and then another Uber back to the station to catch the train to Grand Central.
Everything was lining up. We were on track to reach the platform and hop on the 3:16 pm train with a minute or two to spare. But what do we see when we get there? Our train rolling out toward Manhattan! By God, I didn’t know trains could leave early. Late? Well, sure! All the time. But I’d assumed trains would wait a minute or two on the very rare occasions they were early.
As bad luck would have it, the next train wasn’t due until 3:40—that is, twenty-four minutes later, the longest interval between trains to Grand Central that whole Saturday afternoon.
That’s when Owen started to panic. “Oh no!” he growled. “We missed the train! When’s the next train? When are we gonna have lunch?”
“The next train’s at 3:40,” I said.
“So we’ll have lunch at four, right?”
Then I tried to explain that by the time we got to the city, found a place to eat, ordered our food, and started eating, it would likely be around five.
“Five!?” he said, wild-eyed, pitch ten decibels higher. “Is that a late lunch?”
Even in his distress, he was endeavoring to make things right with the world by reframing what makes lunch lunch and dinner dinner.
Years ago, Diego, too, had worked through the timing-of-meals issue. His reframing involved embracing the concept of dual meals. Breakfast plus lunch is either brunch or lunch-breakfast. There’s also lunch-dinner, lunch-snack, and dinner-snack.
That Saturday, Diego would’ve been totally fine with having lunch-dinner after arriving at Grand Central. Not Owen. The concept of lunch-dinner was foreign to him, the idea of skipping a meal unthinkable. And, by God, a missed train was not about to alter this well-established order of things.
So here’s what I proposed: that as soon as we arrived at Grand Central around 4:15 pm, he could buy pizza at the station food court, his late lunch.
This plan satisfied him.
Still, he needed validation from an independent party, and no one fit the role better than the conductor, the person in the highest position of authority on that train, who, without missing a beat, granted confirmation.
And this, people, is another reason why conductors on trains are essential.